Fearful Symmetry
by skywalker05
Summary: AU. In which Obi-Wan's death on Tatooine and Qui-Gon's reluctant gain of a new and sinister apprentice lead the Jedi Council to take an action not seen since the time of Revan. Darth Maul's memory may be lost, but can the Jedi truly remake him?
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note: This was inspired by Lego Star Wars and the formidable bunch of fanon that ArgenteusDraco and I have (so please don't tell me what is or isn't Maul's "real name".) It'__s of uncertain quality and duration; please review, albeit nicely. I've done my best to research things like electric shocks and stages of grief, so by all means comment on them at the appropriate times. _

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Fearful Symmetry

What the hammer? what the chain?  
In what furnace was thy brain?  
What the anvil? what dread grasp  
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,  
And watered heaven with their tears,  
Did he smile his work to see?  
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright  
In the forests of the night,  
What immortal hand or eye  
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

~William Blake, _The Tyger _

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An unstoppable, tangled skein of emotion spurred Obi-Wan Kenobi off the Naboo starship. He jumped to the baking Tatooine sands after his Master, fearing for Qui-Gon with an intensity that defied orders. It might have been termed _nobility _if the other reason had not been entirely selfish; he felt weak sitting in the ship with Jar Jar and the once-slave boy and the Queen's covey, and so he jumped.

He landed square, the grainy, town-tamed sand giving only slightly beneath his booted feet. Armed with noble fear and noble selfishness as surely as he was with the lightsaber _snap-hiss_ing to life in his hand, he turned to face the Sith.

Who blocked Master Jinn's high strike, gave a livid smile-grimace, activated the second blade of his revealed-to-be-staff lightsaber, and plunged it into Obi-Wan's heart.

____________________________________________________________________________

Qui-Gon opened his eyes, dousing the memory with the orange sear of Obi-Wan's funeral pyre.

Tatooine evening fell fast and cold, and even as the fire crackled in front of him he worked his stiff hands further into the warmth of his sleeves. The stars were bright above the odd curves of the roofs of slaves' quarters, and not brighter than he had ever seen them, but striking compared to the light- and traffic-washed night of Coruscant. The densely speckled band of the galaxy, visible only out here on the Outer Rim, burned cold and cloudy from horizon to horizon.

He and the Queen and her handmaidens had little money to their names after the purchase of the hyperdrive from Watto. Republic credits' value could not be channeled through local banks on this Hutt-controlled world. So the pyre was held just outside the city's walls, and no marker would record its ever taking place. Qui-Gon would speak what words he wanted over it, and Obi-Wan's name would be added to the memorial wall in the Jedi Temple.

The first man to be on record as killed by a Sith in one thousand years.

It kindled dull anger in Qui-Gon's heart to think that the Sith was still alive, sequestered in the starship under Jedi Master Quinlan Vos' and Vos' Padawan's watchful eyes. Worse still was the memory—the remnant certainty—of how close Qui-Gon had been to taking his revenge. He wanted the Sith _dead_, at first _slaughtered_, during the vicious fight between Obi-Wan's death and Quinlan's arrival, then _executed_, when the blindness of rage had faded after Quinlan helped Qui-Gon take the Sith down.

"The Council needs to know all they can of this," Quinlan had said, his grim face sand-scaled to brown above and below the yellow Kiffar stripe that bisected the bridge of his nose. They had knocked the Sith unconscious with a twist of the Force (that and a lightsaber hilt to the temple for good measure). "This is the apprentice—he can tell us the location of the Master." The hilt of the saberstaff had dropped from Quinlan's suddenly sweating hands once the Force psychometry trance was done and he emerged with shadowy glimpses of Sith training, of pain and loyalty—and mental blocks, firewalls like in a computer set to prevent just this type of tampering even when the Sith's consciousness had been snuffed like a candle.

The errant Jedi was right—the Council needed to know. As much as it pained Qui-Gon (and the very fact of the pain did too—he was better than this, he was a _Jedi_—but he should have known that ever since valuing life had set him against the Council he was on unsure moral ground, and he needed a moment of quiet, an eon of meditation, to get the lives lurking within him—the Sith, _Obi-Wan_, the boy Anakin and his blood overflowing with prophecy—wouldn't the Council be willing to hear him on that!—out of his head.

_Obi-Wan. _Not now. Not so soon after _Tahl--_)

But he needed to concentrate on the living, on the cold nothing-like-sea-salt saline taste of the air, on the future, or the dead would drive him insane.

So it was he, Anakin, Shmi, Jar Jar, and the Naboo who stood around the fading pyre, only the fire-sounds and people shuffling in their cloaks disturbing the stark serenity of the desert, and banthas occasionally lowing from a few meters down the wall. One Tusken Raider slouched there, guarding the banthas for a companion who must have gone into town. Anakin sniffled against Shmi's cloak, and Qui-Gon felt that that small sound of sadness and need expressed his own feelings more than his aquiline Jedi-trained face ever could. Age seemed to weigh on his cheekbones like a mask.

He placed his hand on Shmi's rough-clad shoulder and on Anakin's soft hair for a moment, a silent benediction, before trudging from the warmth of the half-circle of mourners to the harsher heat of the pyre. There would be nothing left of Obi-Wan soon, just the flames waving ever lower and an acridity to the capricious desert winds.

He spoke softly, as much to the pyre as to his living allies. Mumbled pronouns could have been either _he _or _you. _"He was a good boy. A strong man. He would have wanted…" but words like _he would have wanted us to go on and never stop our service to the Republic _turned ashen on his lips, smothered by the thought of the _real _Obi-Wan, who would have wanted nothing more than a cup of hot tea and a fatherly hand on his shoulder and an uncompromising, wordless reassurance that anything Qui-Gon might have possibly berated him for, whether it was losing his lightsaber or not seeing the Force perfectly or begrudging Anakin, was forgiven. The Republic came second to that. Inspiring speeches came second to that.

The Jedi had never taught that attachment—romantic, platonic, familial, greedy, any of them--only increased when the object of that attachment was taken away, but Qui-Gon had learned it many times over.

Only time and circumstance completely healed such things (although sometimes what healed them fastest was new attachments.)

Padme stepped in to save him now. Her clear voice rang out, seeming to drive some of the clarity of the open, evening-purple desert toward the cluttered city like wind whisking across a desk piled with papers. Qui-Gon distinctly felt the scorched feeling the day's heat had left in his throat.

She began, facing Qui-Gon. "I have known you two men for only a short time, and in that time you have been as valiant as any heroes I could ever hope to read about. The Jedi were blessed with the presence of Obi-Wan, and may his memory live with us, as Master Jinn lives, for many years ahead…"

**Aayla had always **been curious about the dark.

All children were, she supposed. All of them had lain in their bunks at night and contemplated how _different _the room in which they had spent nearly every night for eight or ten years looked when the glowstrips went out. She had explored that night-world once, crawling on hands and knees and then standing, touching the walls as if in an entirely unfamiliar place. She knew that _dark side_ wasn't the same at all, wasn't for exploring, was dangerous and deadly. Dark in that sense meant nothing like dark in the physical sense—this was knowledge she had gained far before her current age of thirteen. She did not intend for death by metaphor, by homonym.

And yet the darkness-as-tempting was in her head, as appealing as myth, as soft as velvet.

And all she had to do to fall into that comforting nothingness of the dark was open that door.

The one just down the hall, with the roiling, _wanting_ malevolence behind it. It just desired escape, like she did–to escape this planet with its oppressive heat and the sand clotting between her clothing and her skin. Free too from her Master, thoughts of who swept her with the disappointment that he would exude when he knew of her actions. She heard his chiding dimly, as if from far away. "_Aayla. What are you doing? Aayla?"_

Strong hands on her shoulders, and her name meant nothing to her until a shout and a wave of the Force (white like one thousand suns, cutting through the fog she had sunken into) shocked her back to herself.

**The wait had** lasted far too long.

There was nothing to do but endure the oppressive boredom. Darth Maul felt twitchy, like an animal with a fly on its flank. The Jedi were _so close_, the Padawan's half-trained mind caught beneath his will like an insect on a card--

Escape lurked just beyond the simple metal door, unreachable without his lightsaber. That too in the custody of the Jedi–

She would open the door for him, if her thoughts were unattended for a few more moments.

But the Jedi Master lashed out into the Force and loosened the Sith's hold, interrupted his control. The dim glow of the Padawan's presence was lost to his Force-sight. The door shivered under the Kiffar's fist angrily hitting near the controls.

Darth Maul sat back on his haunches, out of the half-crouch in which he had been ready to spring for the hallway when it was revealed. Small movements of his shoulders shifted the bands of muscle there as he tried to relax.

Wrath smoldered, and he made sure the Jedi felt it.

But the dark side prodded for weaknesses like a boxer's cautious jabs, and this time it found–

one filament worked loose from the door's workings by the Jedi's careless slap; the computer lock was no longer securing the door.

Darth Maul harnessed the Force and flung the door open. He fled the ship with the shouts of the Master and Padawan first to chase him.

**Qui-Gon's eyes blurred. **He stared over the Queen's shoulder at a panorama; scallop-shell city wall, purple desert, dark sky, the Naboo ship in the distance. It reflected back the stars and the brown-violet night, blending in to the larger world and becoming as inconsequential as Padme's words. She spoke of Obi-Wan as _valiant_, as _noble_; island-words, shining emerald jots in a briny, burnished sea of truth. Qui-Gon and his apprentice had not parted on friendly terms.

He wished he could apologize to Obi-Wan. He wished that he could reverse anything that Yoda had ever taught him about speaking from the other side and just hear Obi-Wan's voice again. He had been too harsh all along. To focused in his own missions and on the Living Force to see any one living person's needs.

Then he had to battle with himself, had to sink beneath Padme's words to where they had no meaning and they could be simply spectators while he tried to know if he was being too hard on himself or not, whether this really merited the deconstruction of his self that he felt it required…

Then bright reality intruded into his glum thoughts. Lights flashed out of the corner of his eye--near the ship, green and blue bars of neon.

The Force struck him with realization. The Sith had broken free and Quinlan and Aalya were surrounding it on the ramp, but Aayla's lightsaber had been wrenched from her hand into the Sith's.

They were moving toward him. Quinlan had been taken by surprise.

Qui-Gon put a hand on Padme's shoulder, interrupting the conclusion of her speech. "Stay here." He pulled his lightsaber from his belt and ran.

The other three were in motion as well, converging like starfighters on the Tusken camp. The sleeping guard looked like a pile of rags on the sand drifts beside the wall. Behind Qui-Gon—he glanced back, fast like a pilot assessing a tac screen—the rest of his party had formed into groups, those who could fight separating from those who could not. Panaka and Padme in front of the Naboo guards, the handmaidens surrounding Jar Jar and Anakin, the pyre darkening beside them, all alone.

Obi-Wan, for once, unable to fight.

Quinlan chased the Sith to the fringes of the Tusken's temporary camp. Qui-Gon raced to get there before they could get any closer to the confusion—and vulnerable civilians—of the city. His skin felt like leather, as stiff as if the contrast between the chill night and his body temperature had worked it to breaking. Always conscious of himself, when he slipped into blind rage part of his mind still monitored it, measured how he felt up to how a Jedi Master 'ought to feel'.

He would let a little madness take him, to show Obi-Wan's murderer what it had done.

Sooner than expected, Aayla's blue lightsaber was swinging toward him in the Sith's gloved hands. Time seemed to slow down. Qui-Gon blocked high, knew the Sith's feet shifted imperceptibly to prepare it to face Quinlan, who came charging from the other side. He saw the Tusken stir. He saw the bantha goad leaning against a stake, a thin spear of metal and wiring meant to move the beasts forward or stop a stampeding bull in its tracks.

Time froze to a tunnel of Qui-Gon and the Sith and Quinlan in a row, of _I will take this small vengeance and then no more_, of the Tusken's awakening, a chittering cry that echoed. Qui-Gon pulled the bantha goad to his hand, found and thumbed the activation stud, and struck the Sith under the raised arm with the sparking end.

**Quinlan told Qui-Gon **what had happened in the ship. Qui-Gon stood watch over the prisoner for the rest of the flight to Coruscant.

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	2. Chapter 2

**II**

"**Quinlan. Your mission **was completed?" Mace Windu looked impassive and granite-hewn. He stared from just above his steepled fingers at the two Jedi Masters standing in the center of the Council chamber.

The Kiffar looked evenly around at the members of the Council, from wizened Yoda to sleek Depa Billaba. "The dispute was resolved. I had to dig a bit deeper into the gambling dens of Mos Espa than I'd have liked, but they'll be more peaceful now. And Aayla performed well."

_I'll bet you dug deeper into the gambling dens of Mos Eisley than those dens' patrons wish you had_, Qui-Gon thought. Quinlan's methods were often a bit more brutal than he liked; the Kiffar had a knack for falling into situations _best _dealt with with a lightsaber, as rare as those were.

No mention of it was made—the Council was too polite for it—of Aayla's failure on the starship. Quinlan would deal with that as he chose, although surely the Council knew about it one way or another. It was not something to discuss in front of Qui-Gon, although the Padawan might think she could not become more embarrassed in front of him. And there were more pressing matters.

The Sith was currently imprisoned in the basement of the Temple, in quarters not dissimilar from but much more secured than those that housed Yoda's pet kybuck. What the future held for him was the subject of this meeting.

Yoda nodded at Quinlan peacefully. "A success, your mission was. Ongoing, Qui-Gon's is. Quinlan. What saw you, when examined the Sith's belongings you did?"

"The lightsaber brought me glimpses of training, of metal and blood. He fought against droids—and perhaps a Jedi. I couldn't be sure, but it felt like a Jedi. The only other thing we got from him was his cloak and some other weapons. Just more of the same. Darkness—animal darkness. But no information, or less than I would have expected. No scenes, just glimpses."

Yoda shook his head, looking down as if it burdened him. "Dangerous, psychometry can be, if close to the dark side it brings you. Refrain we should from further use of it."

"Especially if it isn't giving us any useful information," said Master Windu. "It is odd that Master Vos did not find more."

Qui-Gon said, "The Sith have been developing weapons about us while we refused to believe in them. Hardships are only to be expected." He felt a small thrill of satisfaction; belief would not be an issue now. Could someone really ask if that had been a Sith?

"Clouds our perceptions the dark side does. Still, more information do we require. Hmm. Discussed, the Council has, what should be done. A momentous decision this is."

It should have felt momentous to Qui-Gon, he supposed. It had been three days since he and the party returned to Coruscant, almost three weeks since he left Obi-Wan's body behind on Tatooine. (From the edges of the galaxy to its center—and so little journeying he had done. Mentally, he felt he should have progressed, gone somewhere. Except he had not.)

"We are placing the Sith in your custody," said reedy-voiced Oppo Rancisis.

Words seemed trapped, rasping and clotting in Qui-Gon's throat. "What about Anakin?"

"Trained he will be by a member of the Council."

Qui-Gon's brow furrowed. Why such politics among the Jedi? They had no love for Anakin. But if he was the Chosen One, they would think that his power would be best kept in their hands.

Quinlan changed the subject. "It seems dangerous to keep the Sith here on Coruscant. Can he be turned? Maybe the Ossus temple—"

Yoda forestalled his words with a wave of a claw. "A solution we have. Careful we will be to keep him less dangerous than we are." He chuckled.

"Master Jinn," said Mace WIndu. "Meet me in the Archives this afternoon.

"You are both dismissed."

Qui-Gon and Quinlan bowed, their robes pooling around their feet. Silently they turned and left the room.

In the moment outside the Council room while they waited for the lift, Quinlan turned to Qui-Gon. "You feel tense. You've been thinking about Obi-Wan?"

_I haven't wanted to. The empty place by my side is enough. _"I did my mourning at the funeral."

"Maybe you should visit his memorial."

He murmured, "Maybe," and thought about how different from the desert the Temple's memorial wall would be.

When he left the lift, he found himself walking in the direction of the memorial instead of toward the library.

**The walls were **a shade between violet and navy, speckled with white striations like the milky path of the galaxy through the night sky. But it was warm, unlike the desert night; Qui-Gon shrugged off his heavy overcloak and held it under his arm as he got his bearings and chose a corridor.

The room of memorial walls took the shape of a stylized star, with a round foyer at its center. To the right, the walls held the names of Jedi who had died in the Temple from age; to the left, those who had fallen outside, in battle.

The list of names on the left was much longer than that on the right, and Obi-Wan's name was the last.

The name looked as if it had been stenciled to the wall in glowing paint. When Qui-Gon brushed his fingers over the white letters, a hologram blossomed, a blue phantom of Obi-Wan seeming to stand half in and half out of the wall. The other names shone through him as he looked up at Qui-Gon, quietly smiling.

Then the hologram expanded, seeming to cut from the wall a half-circle. It showed a training salle, with Obi-Wan and another Padawan battling with practice lightsabers; it changed, letting the phantom Obi-Wan sit and read on the lip of one of the One Thousand Fountains; it cut into the past, revealing an Obi-Wan whose face was still round with the softness of childhood.

It showed every image the Temple had ever kept of him, and as the images progressed Qui-Gon sunk to his knees in the presence of memory.

**Purged of tears**, Qui-Gon joined Mace Windu and Eeth Koth in a dimly lit corner of the Archives. They looked like dark-gilded statues around the holoprojector, and Qui-Gon imagined that he with his downturned expression would look no less emotionless. But the Jedi did not trust their eyes, and he could feel the intent and love of justice within them as surely as they could feel the sadness within him.

The pale-skinned Zabrak Eeth Koth, the ceremonial furrows across his cheeks emphasized by the long shadows of the study niche, activated the holoprojector between them. Qui-Gon peered at it curiously.

It showed a type of chart he was not familiar with, but he recognized almost immediately that he did not because he wasn't a Jedi Watchman; the chart detailed the midi-chlorian count and location of a child who had been found to be Force-sensitive. It listed information about one Ciaràn Surin, a boy from Iridonia with a midi-chlorian count of thirteen thousand, an average amount similar to Qui-Gon's own. The record was old, from twenty years ago. Qui-Gon had almost lifted his eyes from the record when he noticed the last line: _Action taken: none. Subject's whereabouts unknown._

Eeth Koth said, "He was kidnapped shortly after the record was made. His parents weren't eager to let him go, so the Jedi Watchman for the system left them for a few weeks. When he returned, the child was gone and the parents were livid. They thought he had taken him—but that was not the case. After the local security force did what they could, the subject was dismissed as irretrievable. It would have been easy for an animal to get the child, on a world like Iridonia. It was forgotten about."

Mace spoke before Qui-Gon had a chance to ask what this had to do with him. "We took blood samples from the Sith you captured. They match these records."

Surprised, Qui-Gon scanned the sheet of data again without really looking at it. It wouldn't have been difficult for the Council to determine whether there had been potentially Force-sensitive families on Iridonia, not with their extensive records. All they had to do was determine the Sith's age and search for a likely match.

_I had barely recognized him as Zabrak during the fight. _

_It was not only luck that the Watchman was able to take a blood sample before the kidnapping. The Force arranges events for us._

"So we know what might have been," he said. "What about the kidnapper—it must have been the Sith Lord. What does this tell us about him?"

"Unfortunately, nothing." Master Koth said. "His identity is as unknown to us as to the parents or anyone else."

"More than that there is."

Qui-Gon turned to see Yoda hobbling into the room, his Force presence glowing so steadily that it melded with the Temple itself like a sun in a cluster, making it difficult for his location to be pinpointed. Qui-Gon had to smile. Yoda; always learning. Always achieving what would be impossible for any other.

Yoda said, "Know, do you, the story of Revan?"

"Not well. The tales of the Sith are not my specialty."

"Once, a Sith Revan was. But changed Revan, the Jedi Council did. Altered can memories be, minds remade. Precious, life is, but in some cases, lives like databases are; information may be removed, shifted."

Mace said, "We believe that we can alter the Sith's perceptions, make him think that he is the Jedi that he might have been."

Qui-Gon interjected, "That could be very dangerous—"

"He's just an apprentice," said Eeth Koth. "And if we preserve the personalities with just the right balance, he can tell us the location of the Sith Lord."

"I trust that you thought of this because you tried interrogation already."

"Our guest has proved surprisingly resistant."

**The Jedi awoke **him with pain, with a needle slipped under the skin of his neck. While a synthskin patch was applied to the tiny bleed point, he arose from muddled consciousness enough to feel the persistent burn-ache stretching from his ribcage nearly to his hip. He remembered the Jedi Master with the goad. He could remember feeling the shock, that excruciating pain/not-pain that had juddered through his chest and arm.

He didn't remember them drugging him all the way back to this cell on Coruscant, but they must have done so, because the repugnant flavor of the Jedi Temple was all around him.

He thrashed, felt an impact across his forearm and heard hurried footsteps. His vision was blurry, his thoughts muddled. But he chased the Jedi, their useless cries of _Stay still _and _we offer peace _plashing against his senses like lasers on a deflector shield, and after he harnessed the Force to spin one of them around and wrenched its arm from its socket, they didn't come back.

**"In complete control **will we be," Yoda said solemnly. "Prove ill this _will not_."

Qui-Gon nodded, equally solemn. While caution urged him to argue further, the chance to find the Sith Master and end not only the killings of which Obi-Wan may have been just the first but also the fear and darkness which had hung over the Jedi Temple for long enough that a generation had grown up knowing no other feeling was too much of an opportunity to set aside. Part of him balked, whispering that not only would this action endanger the Temple, but that no sentient being had any right to take away the identity of another for their own gain.

But that argument was swept away in a cold flood which Qui-Gon did not like but could not argue against; the Sith had taken everything from Obi-Wan, and almost as much from Qui-Gon. This would practically be Council-sanctioned revenge. And if he were put in charge of the new being formed from the Sith (a being that he perhaps would hold less of a grudge against than the one he held now, the passive hatred that a farmer must feel for a predator who had been picking off his stock--) it would be a chance for redemption. An up-curving journey, instead of the descent that had brought him to Xanatos' fall and Obi-Wan's loss.

"Turned to the light side, Revan did," Yoda said. "and saved the Republic."

Qui-Gon bowed his head. "Your decision is a wise one."

Only Mace gave an inkling of the reaction that Qui-Gon had been expecting; surprise that he would ever hear Qui-Gon agree with the Council so completely.

**When the door **of the cell closed, Darth Maul threw himself against it.

The Force in the Temple, Light and cloying and reminiscent only of standing above the Temple with Sidious and yearning to be told to _destroy it, _infuriated him. But the door was almost seamless with the walls and floor around it. Ramming it with his shoulders only set shivers through him, and exquisite layers of pain from the burn on his side. He sunk to the ground beside the door, fingers clawed and teeth clicking together.

There was nothing he could do except wait.

He could feel how the wait would drive him mad if he went unoccupied. Taking stock of the situation, he found that the Jedi had taken not only his lightsaber, but also his gauntlets with their commlink and lanvarok as well as his rations and other supplies. So they would come again, if only to feed or execute him.

He kneeled to meditate and heal, but the Force here seemed to resist him. His thoughts drifted; his side hurt like fire. It would be a long time before he moved properly again, especially if he couldn't get any bacta.

Whatever they had given him to keep him asleep must not have entirely worn off when the Jedi unexpectedly opened the door, because he had been too focused on himself to feel their presences in the Force. He channeled his anger at himself into standing and pacing toward the Jedi. Three of them—two burly humans and a tentacled alien. One of the humans had a ysalamiri curled around its shoulders, and while the human's disgusted expression was almost worth it, that explained fully why Maul had not felt them approach. He had an attack planned within seconds.

Within those seconds, a fourth Jedi stepped into the room, a green-skinned being barely waist-high. Maul looked down to meet Yoda's eyes. Oh, Sidious had spoken of _him_. Of his inaction, of his narrow-minded philosophy. Of his power, yes—of Sidious' hesitation to clash with the champion of the Jedi. Maul had imagined that Sidious could not have been afraid of Yoda—he had just calculated when the time to strike was, and it had yet to come.

But looking into Yoda's eyes, Maul realized that this Jedi had the ability to---and would not hesitate to—kill with his thoughts alone. He was strong with the light as Sidious had been with the dark, and to Maul it felt alien and scalding.

And then his consciousness was stolen away.

**For a moment **he blinked, saw a starburst design on a tiled floor. He was surrounded. The Jedi presences, powerful as waves, arced above him.

They crashed down.

_Voices push against his consciousness, straining cohesion like sinews to breaking, threatening to invade the protected innards of his mind. When finally the fraying lines snap, what were once linear thoughts are gone, flood-flattened, recut like the ground under treaded boots. They are polluted, leaving him only with murky eddies of thought. Then he is in—no, _is_—nothingness, only a squirming fighting little instinct, burrowed like an animal into the mud, telling him that there is something worth regaining consciousness for._

_There is only formlessness, quietude._

_A not-word is uttered/released/found/rings out, and the taste of it, the tiny packet of precise knowledge that introspection often gives him instead of words, spells the dark._

_Dark is all he is now, formless, selfless, nameless like _before _when—but the memory is gone._

_The dark and its urges toward revenge always sustained him, always bade him thrive._

_And so he hangs onto the presence/voice/taste of the dark, while the Jedi deluge washes away all it can of him. _


	3. Chapter 3

**III**

The room slid into view as the Zabrak opened his eyes. Pale orange walls, yellow doorframes. A wavering, as if he needed to blink; water on a bedside table at his eye level. He could tell by how heavy his limbs felt that he had been asleep for a long time.

"Ciaràn Surin." Voices he did not recognize, speaking a name he did not know. He opened his eyes once more, glimpsed faces. They meant nothing.

Except for one.

He remembers—he does not know the name. Bright one, teacher-protector-jester. The name of this person is Yoda, and he does not know that, yet he feels its meaning.

Once, when the Zabrak was very young, Yoda sat at the end of his bed, his stubby, clawed hands filled with ribbons…

_Yoda flicked his wrist to reveal that the ribbons were a toy, or a simple weapon; a length of supple chain decorated with the waving cloth. The boy reached up, caught the end of the chain in his fist. Connected now to Yoda by the length of ribbon-decked chain, the Zabrak tugged, fascinated by the swaying bands of cloth and the way they concealed, then revealed, the shining metal._

_Yoda gave a sort of growl or purr. "No, Ciaràn. Hold too tight do not."_

_But the _want _he felt was all the argument he needed, and want did not need to be said because he felt it so insistently. He pulled harder, sinking away from the physical appearance of the ribbon to grasp its molecules and atoms with the Force. So it came as a close shock when the bauble split. The ribbons dropped limp onto the bed, while links of chain burst apart and rang like tiny bells as they struck the walls and floor. The Zabrak's eyes widened._

"_Hold too tight do not, young one." Yoda's lantern-eyes glowed as he shook his head. "Attachment, to loss leads." _

_The young Zabrak closed his eyes. _

_A new memory, a few years later. A pack of seven-or-eight year-old Padawans sat in a circle around Master Yoda, jostling for space on the mats. He remembered Twi'leks, Rodians, humans, all members of his Clan._

_Yoda silenced them with a quiet question. "What is our Temple made of, hmm?"_

_Answers were hastily volunteered. "Ferrocrete!"_

"_Steel!"_

"_The Force!"_

_Yoda laughed at that last one, a quiet, mirthful sound that did not mock the Initiate that prompted it. "These things the walls are, but the Temple inside the walls is, hmm?"_

_Another youngling volunteered, "Air?"  
"Hmm," Yoda smiled, filling the Zabrak with as much a sense of satisfaction as if he had answered the question correctly himself. Yoda said, "Build we do with matter, but use we do, the nothingness inside."_

_They meditated then, trying to find the nothingness to use within themselves._

_The next memory was the strongest, the most recent and comfortable. Lightsabers flashed, blue and white, in front of him. The pressure of the intersecting fields strained the sinews of his hands. He retreated under his opponent's onslaught, spinning the silver staff lightsaber before him to serve as a shield. His opponents fanned out, Master Jinn breathing hard and Master Drallig flinty-eyed. _

_The Zabrak is good at this. He associates it with praise; associates his name, Ciaràn, with praise. He slipped aside, placed Master Qui-Gon between himself and the more skillful Master Drallig. But he was standing at the edge of the elevated platform now, unable to move backwards._

_Master Drallig held up a hand, a flash of human-pale, sinewy palm. "Enough."_

_Qui-Gon and Ciaràn turned off their lightsabers, bowed to one another with a swishing of brown cloaks. Ciaràn looked out at the classroom full of younglings whom they had been doing the practice bout in front of. He smiled apologetically down at the boy who he had nearly stepped on, while Drallig told them about fighting multiple opponents, explaining the strategies that Ciaràn had used. They boy's smile in return was fearless._

_Throughout his Jedi training, Ciaràn had worked with Drallig almost as much as with Qui-Gon. He trusted them, could recall one thousand times in which they had earned his respect and loyalty. _

_These memories showed what Ciaràn saw as the qualities of the ideal Jedi; nonattachment; ability to achieve a state of nothingness in mind and therefore more clearly see meaning; and martial skill. He strove for and pondered these. They drove him._

_They sent him to sleep at night, and woke him up._

He woke up.

"**When wake he **does, be there you should," Yoda had said. "As if he is waking from a fever it is."

And so, Qui-Gon stood where he did not want to be, at the door to the room in which the Sith recovered from the Council's digging through his mind. Qui-Gon kept to the doorjam, his hands folded in his sleeves, like a nervous Initiate waiting for a reprimand. He mentally shook himself and approached the bed as the Sith's—_Ciaràn's_, he told himself, _that is his name now, if it hasn't always been—_conscious quickly stirred him out of sleep.

His eyes opened. The spidering tattoos following the muscle lines of his face seemed to point to those eyes, the irises ugly with splotches of orange, yellow, and golden-brown. Qui-Gon searched for words. The Council was supposed to have reprogrammed the Sith. He would remember Qui-Gon.

And yet the Jedi wondered whether the conditioning would work.

The Sith sat up, head bowed even as he looked around the room alertly. His eyes locked on Qui-Gon's, and for a moment the Jedi had to wonder whom he meant as he murmured, "Master."

**Darth Sidious waited **for the droid to show itself. Although it looked like a protocol droid, C-3PX did not sound like one. It walked on soft treads, designed for sneaking up on whomever it had been ordered to assassinate.

The Sith Lord had been tracking the _Scimitar _since its cloaking device had turned off when it entered the skyways of Corsuscant. He knew that Darth Maul was not aboard. The droid had done the piloting; that was one of its functions.

"Where is your master, C-3PX?" Sidious asked.

The droid shuffled to his side, light gleaming off its golden skull except for where the plate-metal X had been stapled to the finish. This droid did not bandy words, and nor, Sidious knew, could it lie. "Sir, he was captured by the Jedi."

Sidious did not respond, although an angry sigh tried to work its way through his clenched teeth. He did not like to show that circumstances had been unforeseen to him, even in company as prosaic as a droid that he had given to his apprentice long ago. He turned, began to walk up one of the floating hallways which had been installed in the Works since Darth Maul's training began. The droid followed, its otherwise undetectable footsteps sending small white ripples through the lightscreen material of the floor.

"Return to the Infiltrator and conserve your power," Sidious said, dismissing C-3PX. He would need the droid no longer.

Sidious' sphere of influence extended, albeit through third-and-fourth-parties, into the Jedi Temple itself. It was one of the weaknesses of Force users setting themselves up as an organization with many members; they required support from mundane individuals and groups; suppliers of food, of electricity, of transportation of goods. Beings there were easy to bribe and would never trace those bribes back to someone called Sidious.

From them he could gather information about how the Jedi had managed his apprentice. They would not kill Darth Maul, he did not think, and so Maul might kill a few of _them_ before the episode was over, which Sidious could not see as a detriment. It was amusing to think of how twitchy the apprentice would be, set down suddenly onto the killing field he had always dreamed of. (Sidious had fostered those dreams professionally, engrained them into Maul's thoughts since before the Zabrak knew a name to call himself) . Equally interesting was the question of whether the Jedi would stop trying to get information about Sidious and the Sith out of Maul before the apprentice's resilience to either psychic intrusions or torture killed him themselves.

C-3PX turned and moved off, leaving Sidious to continue on himself.

Darth Maul was not, in fact, Sidious' priority, although C-3PX would never have known. It was the boy whose Force presence Maul had described as a "bright beacon" who really interested him; the Jedi had gained a Force user to their party on Tatooine, and Sidious felt with little uncertainty that it was the Chosen One whose life Darth Plageus had set in motion decades ago. The Jedi thought that their Prophecy had brought him to them, and it had been merely the machinations of the dark side.

That boy and Darth Maul were now in relatively close quarters, and this Sidious needed to keep an eye on. If the boy was the Chosen One, such a live wire should not be in his vulnerable presence for long, not if Sidious' schemes for him went as he wished them to.

He had planned all along for the boy to be picked up by the Jedi ; it would have been foolish not to. Statistically, it was one hundred or more to one that Sidious would have found the boy instead of some Jedi Watchman, and even longer odds when the amount of planets in the galaxy were added to the equation. Sidious needed to be on Coruscant for the political part of his rise to power, and so that was where Darth Maul's training took place—and that, the site of the Jedi's Great Temple, was exactly where he wanted the Chosen One to be.

As natural as walking, Sidious sank into the Force.

He knew that it would be of no avail to try to sense the Jedi's activities. The neutral Force flowed around their bastion like fast-flowing water around a rock, and within that split stream, they exuded light. Like a firewall on the HoloNet, the Temple resisted his attempts to gather information from within it. He could not break this shield, but he could counter it with one of his own, the slowly growing cloud of the dark side which he had set into motion long ago. It would sweep the psychic byways of the planet and beyond, striking the Jedi with as much blindness as the nexus their Temple sat on inflicted on him.

But although learning about the Jedi in their Temple was not best done through the Force, he was still tightly bound to his apprentice. He reached along the channels specific to the tie between them, searching—

He found glimmers of familiarity—intent, rage, Maul's sundry signatures in his mind. But they were purposeless, not escalated. It was unlikely that he was in any sort of action. If only Sidious could have seen more clearly he could have known whether the apprentice was asleep or awake.

But he could not, even as he concentrated all of his considerable Force faculties on that simple task. His thoughts slipped away from Maul, and in a moment he realized why. It was as if the apprentice's mind were cut off from his body, were disconnected from the world. Like but unlike unconsciousness.

This needed considering. Sidious eased out of his immersion in the Force as he entered the chamber equipped for secure communication. He was angry, and the being he was going to contact first would be lucky to come away from this contact alive, if there was any imperfection or protest in it.

But Sidious would find out what had happened on Tatooine.


	4. Chapter 4

**IV**

Qui-Gon waited in the antechamber while Ciaràn was waking. As one of the older Padawans, the Zabrak had a three-room suite to himself, near his Master's quarters.

Ciaràn caught a quick look at himself in the mirror as he dressed for the day. He thought for the hundredth time that no one really looked like they imagined themselves to look. This marked face and wide eyes were not his—but then he did not think they had ever been; he did not look at himself often. Only the tattoos drew his attention, as he wondered whether it was wrong to bear these signs of a loyalty to and fondness for the Zabrak culture that warred with insular Jedi tradition.

It did not matter. He would not undo that action.

He emerged into the antechamber, a comfortably furnished kitchen-sitting room combination done in the warm pastel colors characteristic of the temple tower used for residence. Unlike Qui-Gon's preferred tans, Ciaràn wore black clothing but for dark brown tabards tipped with sigils. "Good morning, Master."

Qui-Gon was rummaging through cabinets, and ceased his search to turn and look at the apprentice. "You're unfortunately lacking in tea."

"Hmn. I'll order some more."

"Good. We'll be in the Temple for the next few weeks, keeping low after Naboo. Master Drallig wants to see you this afternoon."

Ciaràn's memories of their latest mission were brief and inconsequential, although he would be curious to know what would happen to Anakin Skywalker and the Trade Federation blockade. There were other things to focus on. "I look forward to that."

Qui-Gon headed for the door, his long hair sweeping about his shoulders. "Do not let eagerness cloud your mind."

Ciaràn shook his head. They had had this talk before, and it was one of their few points of departure, how Ciaràn felt no different about combat than he did about life in general, whereas Qui-Gon seemed to think it required a whole new mindset. Jokingly the apprentice aimed a punch at the back of Qui-Gon's head.

Fear eked through the Force like fungus webs infecting a rotted branch, and Ciaràn was surprised to see how surprised Qui-Gon looked as the Jedi Master turned and deflected the punch with his forearm. They traded a few halfhearted attacks and parries, Ciaràn grinning widely. But Qui-Gon's Force sense was disturbed, and Ciaràn followed his mentor out into the Temple proper feeling distinctly as if he had done something wrong.

The practice rooms for combat smelled homey and familiar when the two arrived. The scene of sweat and lightsaber-ozone-tang clung not unpleasantly to the padded floor. Drallig, a white-haired human with features not as sharply aquiline as Qui-Gon's, smiled tightly as Ciaràn entered, and the Padawan returned it. Recalling the unusual stilted conversation with Master Qui-Gon in the morning, Ciaràn thought that what he liked about the battlemaster's self-confidence and sincerity, his open face and thoughts. Drallig was not complex, and he was not afraid.

_**I should have **__known_, Qui-Gon thought, _that the Council would not yet let this experiment go unobserved. _

Jedi Master Kit Fisto, who was very often seen in one training room or another, was waiting there. He pulled Qui-Gon aside as Ciaràn crossed the room to join Cin Drallig.

Qui-Gon muttered, "Why did the Council let him keep his ability to fight?"

"We can learn about him this way, about what he's been taught."

"And at the same time, we put so many people in danger. They could have stripped him of Force powers." Qui-Gon did not at all like the idea of Kit as mouthpiece for the Council, but had an inkling that the Nautolan was just parroting that body's answers to his inevitable questions. Those questions had been nagging him; he didn't like the idea of the Sith in the hallways of the Temple, interacting with Padawans as young or younger than the impressionable Anakin Skywalker. The fact that the assignment to train Ciaràn kept Qui-Gon from watching over Anakin, being involved with the blockade of Naboo, _or _having any length of time to question the Council did not fail to cross his mind.

It was hard to distrust or begrudge Yoda, who had helped Qui-Gon so much and made him at least by proxy everything that he was, but it was getting easier.

"Muscle memory was suspected to be inseparable from his impression of self," Kit said. "And, well, Revan was purged of the Force to be rid of the dark side, but Master Yoda suspects that if we did that to your new Padawan, the shroud of the dark side would simply rush in to fill the void. His instincts would still tend that way."

That made sense. This all made sense, Qui-Gon thought, even if it was a drastic step taken in a time of the rumbling of war. Information gotten from Ciaràn about the Sith could be invaluable in finding out who had created that very shroud.

Qui-Gon asked, "Do they plan to get the identity of the Sith Lord out of him?"

"Yes. Judging by Revan, if he becomes loyal enough to the Jedi he could remember his past but regret it, give us help willingly. Yoda also suggests exploring his subconscious as best we can."

"If anything were going to be hazardous—"

"This whole thing is hazardous, Qui-Gon, and the Council knows it. I'm nervous too, but it's not like we have no solutions to the problem of him getting out of control. He's on our territory; you yourself defeated him once. He wouldn't be impossible to stop, even if he went back to how he was before we mindwiped him.

"We do what the Council says, but we keep our guard up, and we always put one of our own before this experimental fosterling if either is in danger."

**There was something **very impressive about the fact that Anakin Skywalker had lived his entire life outside the Temple. However, there was also something subtly unsettling, or even funny, about how he had been put into classes with older children in mechanics, languages, and math, but with younger ones in history, combat, and the Force. Aayla knew this setup because he was somewhat of a friend to her, they being the only two children on the ship back from Naboo, and she knew because most kids in the Temple knew. Anakin was exotic enough to perpetuate rumors that even the Masters heard.

The speeder that Aayla was working on sat solidly on jacks beneath her as she kneeled on the partially opened hood and recalibrated the altimeter. With her free hand she scooped up a diagnostic datapad and waved it over the faulty altimeter. Sensing the match between the altitude it measured and the one the speeder did, it glowed green. Aayla smiled.

Like the rest of the class in the garage, she wore a black coverall to protect her Jedi robes from fluids, and so she felt delightfully unencumbered as she crawled across the hood and leaned down to look underneath the speeder, holding her lekku back with one hand. "Hey Anakin! I'm going on a mission soon."

The human boy was on his back with a hydrospanner aimed at the speeder's innards. "Are you going to help the Naboo?"

Surprised that he knew or had guessed, she replied, "Yeah. Did Master Vos tell you?"  
"They need freedom, just like I got." The boy's face was grim for one so young. "If you see Padme, say hello to her for me."

**After initial stretches **and exercises, Master Drallig and Ciaràn practiced break-falls.

"A shoulder roll," Drallig said, "Will get you out of the way of an attack and back on your feet."

Ciaràn performed a handful of rolls, once stumbling and sprawling for a moment until he stood up solidly again. "It doesn't feel natural."

"That means you're doing it right."

Ciaràn knew that these moves were Jedi standard, tried, tested, and picked from the most efficient martial arts in the galaxy. He should be comfortable with this; he knew Drallig's movements nearly as well as his own. But he felt now that if Drallig were to touch him he would shy away; not a helpful attitude. And he saw a gap in the Master's logic. "Why do we learn what to do when we fall instead of learning to stay on our feet?" He found his left hand drifting to his side, where the lightning burn from the Tusken Raider attack during their last mission still ached when he moved too often. The scar had bisected the tattooing there and was still bound with synthskin.

Drallig noted his discomfort and sat, gesturing for Ciaràn to do the same.

"It would be arrogance to assume that even with all the training in the worlds a person might never fall. We don't focus on learning falls. All students are expected to practice them, but sparring and things have priority."

Thankful that the answer had not been _we are going to work on falls today because you are injured and I don't want to hurt yo_u_, _Ciaràn nodded. Even if Drallig _meant _that—and why shouldn't he, when nor did Ciaràn want to hurt himself further before he could heal—it was a source of pride that he hadn't said it.

Drallig said, "I'd take you through some combat-readiness meditations, but Master Jinn may want to do that himself."

Ciaràn nodded, and stood when Drallig did. The Zabrak met Qui-Gon at the door.

"You ought to get going," said the Jedi Master. "You'll be late for class."

Ciaràn had the sinking feeling that he'd forgotten not only his homework but also the fact that he had had class today at all. When Qui-Gon prompted him with "Mid-Rim Political History, down at the west gate to the Fountains?" he knew with relief that he hadn't. As he headed down the hallway, he heard Master Qui-Gon say "Don't be surprised if you see Master Fisto down there; he might be swimming after his workout."

**The election had **been a success, and Jedi Knights would be returning to Naboo. Darth Sidious smiled as he indulged in a brief fantasy of congratulating his alter ego, now-Chancellor Palpatine, on a job well done.

His plans for the galaxy could now move forward. It was not nearly as simple as 'defeating the Separatists at Naboo would give the Republic morale'; this foray, however it ended, would catapult the Republic into war. That was what was important. To suffer just enough so that the Republic became a needy, hope-seeking thing, primed to fall under the spell of a compelling leader.

And not only the Republic as a whole, but also critical members…

C-3PX shuffled up beside Sidious as he walked. "Master, the task on which you set me is complete."

"Tell me."

"Master, the Jedi have…" Was there frightened hesitation where there should be none from a droid? "inducted Lord Maul into their ranks. My sources report a Jedi matching his description."

Sidious waited for more, but received only silence. Such a thing was impossible! He knew himself enough to be certain that such a thought was not frank denial—it would be _impossible _for Darth Maul to conform to the light side's standards, due to his conditioning and predispositions. Perhaps physical damage to the apprentice's brain could cause such a shift, but…

Purposefully inflicted damage to the brain. The Jedi could have mindwiped him—that would explain the half-glimmers and suggestions that Sidious sensed when he searched for Maul in the Force. Such a thing had not been done for thousands of years…but it had been done before.

"You received reports of his behavior, did you not?"

"No my lord. It was as if he was just another Jedi."

_Hmm_. Sidious' eyes narrowed, pulled perceptibly at his dusty skin. "Leave me."

"Yes lord." The droid silently moved away, and Sidious entered the communications room alone. He sat down, thought of the day's events.

Just as the Jedi Council had made an ally of Darth Maul, so too had Sidious taken one of their own today. Or, at least, he was very sure he would have by tomorrow.

He had met Jedi Master Dooku at the Senate session where Sidious—no, Palpatine--had been elected Chancellor. Dooku stood like a dark-cloaked pillar at the exit of the rotunda, and when Sidious passed him he paused a moment to hear the count's congratulations.

He pretended to take a step away and then hesitate, pretended that it was from Dooku's face and not his Force sense that Sidious surmised his discomfort. "You seem unsettled, Count. Is everything all right?"

Even Dooku's shuffling looked regal. After a moment, he met Sidious' eyes. "I am not pleased with the current state of the Republic. I do not mean this as an affront."

"Go on. The wisdom of a Jedi is invaluable to me."

Anger Sidious had never seen in Dooku before made the Jedi's voice a sonorous condemnation, like the list of crimes read before a hanging. "The Jedi Council's _wisdom_ is not faultless. Trepidation not only in the Force suggests that the galaxy tilts toward war.

"The apprentice of one who was once my apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi, was killed in battle. The Council did not stop to mourn."

Sidious pretended to mull this over. Inside his shield of the invisible Force, he laughed. "Can you not reason with the Council?"

Dooku's silence was its own answer. Sidious murmured, "Perhaps disagreement is best solved with a split of the opposing parties." Then louder, smiling, noting with pleasure the alien dignitaries walking by, "Feel free to speak to me about any relevant concerns you may have; my administration is for the people."

When Dooku walked out of the Temple, Sidious would be there to meet him.

And Dooku's contacts to the bounty hunter Jango Fett, formerly a being whose existence had matter not at all to Sidious, would be a good start to removing Darth Maul from the clutches of the Jedi. The Sith Lord had never thought he would find a bounty hunter so useful, except as material for blackmailing Dooku. But now…Anakin Skywalker was the Chosen One, but he was also an untrained boy, and so Maul would die so that Skywalker was more likely to live.


	5. Chapter 5

**V**

Ciaràn idly traced the outline of a gash in the stone bench he sat on, half-listening to the Master in the front of the class talking about the trade routes between Ilexia and Rondoon. The class, ten or so Padawans arrayed on benches and flagstones near one of the fountains that gave the great room on the main level of the Jedi Temple its name, were with few exceptions paying rapt attention; none of them knew when this information might be used during a mission. But the sound of the fountains and the gentle yellow light around them were hypnotic, and it would be so easy to stretch out on this bench and try to get more comfortable than he was now….

"Padawan Szurin." The Master's voice was, Ciaràn imagined, grating even for a Barabel. "What iz the major export of Rondoon?"

"Chemical weapons."

"No," the Barabel said, "it iz marakan fruits, which are used for relaxing incense involved with both Rondoon and Ilexian formal ceremonies. It is important to remember on any trip to either planet to—"

"Master," came a voice from Ciaràn's left in the gaggle of Padawans. Someone raised a webbed and sucker-tipped hand. "Marakan fruits can be used in chemical warfare."

The Barabel cocked his saurian head to the side.

"I've pulled it up here on the HoloNet," said Ciaràn's benefactor, a tentacle-headed Ho'Din with green skin and golden-brown hands. Ciaràn could not at the moment tell the alien's gender. The Ho'Din said, "The marakan incense can be concentrated into a riot gas that, well, relaxes people enough to get them to stop rioting. Or perhaps breathing."

The four females crowded onto the bench next to the one where Ciaràn sat snickered; he heard one mutter, "If it's on the HoloNet, it must be true."

"Hmm", said the Barabel, its scaly lips pressed tight together. "Thank you, Padawan Ookett." With a relaxed expression he faced the class as a whole. "I have heard that fact as well; in a way, Padawan Szurin was right. We must learn the benefitz of queztioning our elderz, although we muszt do thiz judiciouszly.

"But we muszt also learn that upon visiting either Rondoon or Ilexian embassies, smellz enough to overpower the lowly concentrated incense are strictly prohibited, even scents as benign az natural odor…."

When the class was over, the Padawans packing up, Ciaràn approached Padawan Ookett. "Thanks."

The Ho'Din —he? she?—was putting the datapad back into a satchel. "You're welcome." After a moment of hesitation they shook hands. "I'm Rali Ookett."

"Ciaràn Surin."

"I haven't seen you around before. Who's your Master?"

"Qui-Gon Jinn. I was away on a mission a few weeks ago…"

Rali's tentacles rearranged. Unlike a Nautolan's, some of them did not lie flat but seemed to float independent of gravity, like the fronds of a plant. Ho'Din, Ciaràn knew, were reptilian, but shared some traits with plants. "No, I don't think that was it," Rali said. "You just joined this class last week, didn't you? Some of the others got nervous when a new face showed up; no offense."

Ciaràn was getting nervous from Rali staring at him. "No, I've been—"

"Ciaràn!" The call in Master Fisto's voice came from the direction of the fountain, and a moment later the Padawans saw the Nautolan striding around a potted plant with his cloak flung over his shoulder, looking as if he had just emerged from a pond. "Qui-Gon would like to speak with you near the promontory."

"Yes, Master," Ciaràn replied. "Nice you meet you," he said in passing to Rali Ookett, and jogged off into the Room of a Thousand Fountains.

It felt good to move after the long class. Two weeks had gone by—four rather dull sessions of Mid-Rim Political History—since the trip to Tatooine, and already he was eager for another mission. Still Qui-Gon maintained that Jedi not essential to the Separatist blockade were to stay in the Temple, and that Ciaràn's burned skin needed further healing.

He found Qui-Gon kneeling on a sward of grass, his head bowed. When he looked up, it was with a dark expression, a timbre in the Force that suggested weariness. Ciaràn kneeled beside him, concerned. "You look troubled, Master."

Qui-Gon waved talk away. "Don't worry—it's nothing. Sit."

Ciaràn settled onto the cool grass. Crystal spray from a waterfall behind them flicked his skin, sending twitches across the skin along his jaw. Suddenly unsettled, he swallowed an unfamiliar taste. In these silences and darkness—sometime between the last few heartsbeats he had closed his eyes—was when he was most aware of himself, of the tight flesh of his injured side, of his weight pressing into the ground.

Qui-Gon murmured, "Meditate."

Restricting the world to the physical was the first step in forgetting the world. In the space of a few breaths Ciaràn claimed his heartbeats for his own, measuring and regulating…

…_into the nothingness the Jedi called their own. It was not a state that could be defined or examined, for by definition it could not be observed. Any observer's purpose was to delete their own consciousness. _

_With consciousness shunted to the side, the Force could become all the _self _that was needed. _

_Nameless, formless, to all appearances purposeless, the Force wafted the Zabrak's thoughts deeper into psychic currents. Time meant nothing as his body relaxed and he paid it no heed. _

_Time passed. Memory passed. And the Force took form._

_He saw a city. There were people, masses thronging streets. All above and around him, all out of sight. There was life up there among the neon; random, varied, swarming._

_Down here, only one life mattered._

_The Jedi._

_Her presence, her _scent, _was infuriating. But_ compelling _as well, as crisp a sight as silhouettes against sunset. They are fighting, and he is engulfed-surrounded-blinded by the fight—_

_Lightsabers slit the air, red and blue, white-gold at contact. He presses forward, driving the Padawan backwards along the narrow catwalk. She is distracted, and he is focused._

_And she leaves an opening, a muscle-twitch pulled too far, and he strikes—_

Qui-Gon, half-kneeling in front of Ciaràn and with concern cascading through the Force, jerked backwards. Within moments Ciaràn struck him twice or thrice again with the heels of his hands, slamming with dull hollow thuds against the human's chest. When Ciaràn regained his control of himself he was standing in front of a Qui-Gon about to leap onto the rim of a fountain and kick him, and the Zabrak's next strike was aimed to break his Master's nose.

Ciaràn felt his face change. Like water draining from a cup energy left him, closed his teeth over his lips and smoothed the skin between his eyes. He staggered backwards, gasping as if deep breaths could help him inhale the calming Force mien Qui-Gon protected. Footsteps rang out, and Ciaràn knew that Master Fisto was standing a few meters behind him now, ready to move.

Ciaràn murmured, "I killed her."

Fisto said something—over the sounds of water he caught "Just a vision." Then Qui-Gon approached him, serene as the Temple itself, his gray eyes narrowed. "Padawan."

"Master Jinn." Ciaràn couldn't meet his eyes. But the wild emotion of the vision was receding, replaced by reality and rationality. Jedi saw things, sometimes, and the interpretation of those things…

Allowed for such vagaries as the point of view in the vision not really being Ciaràn himself. Violence had been done, or would be done in the future. How much it touched him was uncertain now.

But it left him fearful, as if the sanctuary of meditation had become a battlefield. When Qui-Gon extended his forearm Ciaràn clasped it and stood up. Qui-Gon did not hesitate to ask him the details of the vision, and Ciaràn was glad. Inaction would give him time to think, and dwelling on those thoughts would allow the image of the girl's—the Jedi's--dying gasp to sink in and weaken him. Both he and Qui-Gon were more practical than that.

"**Her name was **Darsha Assant," said Eeth Koth. " and she is no longer listed as missing in action."

"We suspected she had been killed by the Sith," said Mace Windu, fingers steepled in front of his craggy face. "but there was a period of time after her mission where we were kept uncertain of any activities related to her and her late Master. They hide themselves well, these Sith do."

"But no longer." Yoda looked directly at Qui-Gon, who stood in the middle of the Council chamber with his hands folded in his sleeves. "More information may we retrieve from Ciaràn's subconscious."

"Master, the meditation was painful for him," said Qui-Gon. "He felt worried, guilty, like any one of us would have if we'd seen ourselves do that."

"A good sign this is. A more firm hold will the Jedi personality take in such times of stress. Understand I do how you must feel, Qui-Gon, wanting no one to suffer." And Qui-Gon did feel Yoda's remorse, a capacity for limitless emotion that amazed him, tied irrevocably as it was to a sense of duty, to a conviction that that emotion must not get in the way of what was right for not just the Jedi or any individual person, but for the galaxy. He did not want to think about whether felt the same way or not. "But prevent many deaths we can if discovered the Sith Lord is, and one guide we have toward him now."

_He killed Darsha Assant_, Qui-Gon thought. _Probably her Master too._ _Those hands I saw around a flagon of tea this morning sent a lightsaber through Obi-Wan. That is not hard to believe._

_It is hard to reconcile._

With characteristic Council ability to seamlessly read the thoughts of both the other Council members and the Jedi in their midst, Eeth Koth's resonant voice boomed through the silence in which Qui-Gon might have, if not preempted, voiced an argument. "Do not discourage meditation unless Ciaràn specifically asks it of you. It is no lie that all Jedi have unsettling visions some times. Here, the gain is worth more than the loss."

Qui-Gon knew that it was easy for them to say that, when the loss was not theirs and when the presence at their sides did not threaten them in both sleeping and waking hours. He was frightened of Ciaràn and frightened of how angry he got at the Sith, and he had kept both battened down. It was easy, in the numbness after Obi-Wan's death.

But that numbness was beginning to crack open, like dried mud in the sun releasing worms of dirty water.

When Qui-Gon left the Council tower by the turbolift and stepped out into a lower hall, the immediate sight of Master Dooku walking serenely along a few meters away seemed to bring back all the mental uncertainty that had struck Qui-Gon in his childhood. He quaffed a sudden vision of himself shouting "Master Dooku!", running across the hall and tugging on the dark-robed sleeve, although none of this emotion touched his face.

But the Force did just as well. Dooku turned, looking down his aquiline visage at Qui-Gon just as Qui-Gon knew he had done to Obi-Wan not a few times. "Good evening, my old friend," Dooku said.

"Good evening."

Dooku kept walking, but body language told Qui-Gon that he was comfortable with company. The older man said, "I see you have been meeting with the Council."

"I have. I agreed wholeheartedly at first that we should adopt someone new into our rank—I'm sure you've heard about my Padawan." (He thought for a moment that Dooku might think he meant Obi-Wan, and did not correct him. Let them speak of that death—let Dooku take a bit of the pain.) "I agreed that we should take him in, that he should learn from the Jedi. But I do not entirely trust the memory alteration technique that the Council used will hold." _As much as I see Ciaràn as a pet project, a sentient being whose life should be lived fully, he is also a bomb ready to explode._

Dooku, Qui-Gon's former Master, said, "I visited Obi-Wan's memorial." Then he was silent, and when he spoke again there was a papery thinness in his voice, as though he were frightened or lying or simply rehearsing for a speech he would later give before an audience. "The Council is staunch one moment and inconsistent the next. They have made poor decisions and put people in danger.

"That which holds the Jedi together is falling apart."

The two walked together in silence down the hall, Qui-Gon wondering over whose eyes the proverbial wool had been pulled. The Council had tricked Ciaràn into a new life; had they used their authority to trick the whole Temple into believing that Ciaràn—and Anakin—would under current circumstances bring more good than harm?

At an intersection of corridors, Dooku turned left and Qui-Gon continued on ahead, toward the training room where Ciaràn could be found.

Only later did Qui-Gon, remembering the exchange, realize that only Dooku's most surface thoughts had been open to him. It was not very unusual for one Jedi to hide things from another, as any sentient being had thoughts it wanted to keep for itself. However, that hiding was itself a use of the Force, detectible as such especially when the two people concerned had known one another for a long time.

But Qui-Gon had not been able to tell Dooku's mood, and had also been deflected from wondering why not.


	6. Chapter 6

**VI**

Jedi Master Dooku walked into a once-abandoned room that contained one blue glowstrip and more Force presences than he had expected. Where he had brought one other being with him, Darth Sidious had brought two; Jango Fett, a man in full armor that Dooku vaguely recognized as Mandalorian; and a black-furred Cathar girl in purple armor festooned with a silver mesh half-skirt. The Twi'lek servant beside Dooku was nervous, any paling of his slate-blue skin not showing in the dim light. _He knows he is among his betters,_ Dooku thought, _and although I am not sure even whether I am among equals, I will arrange a killing to prove my loyalty. _

"Welcome, Count Dooku," said Darth Sidious, voice cracking like dry mud in the sun, and the use of his secular title was not lost on Dooku. His faith in the worth or superiority of the Jedi was gone after the death of Obi-Wan and the failure of the Council to see men as men instead of pawns. The Sith, at least, wore their treachery on their sleeves. Here was unabashed cruelty, unabashed superiority, no hypocrisy-- and a count of Serenno could fall into that.

Dooku said, "The bounty hunters will speak to my contact." He glanced aside, and the Twi'lek shuffled forward. Dooku could only presume that the young alien woman beside Fett was a bounty hunter as well; the Mandalorian, not he, had secured her services.

"The temple is shielded from intrusion from the airways," Fett said. "What can you do about that?"

The Twi'lek's words were rushed. "I work in shipping at the lower levels of the temple; know just where the openings are." Dooku would pay him well if he told the correct information. A threat would have been more efficient, but Dooku hadn't wanted the Twi'lek to project that much fear within the temple walls. Killing the informant later was always a possibility anyway…now that Dooku had gone as far into the dark side as he had.

Fett asked, "We can get to the roof from there?"

"Sure. I'll even get you a ysalamiri."

The three without the Force drew closer together to talk, and Sidious circled around them just outside the light cast by the glowstrip. He paused to murmur to the Mandalorian, "Remember, Jango Fett; one target. Kill the Zabrak. The human boy is to be spared at all costs."

Close up, Dooku could see how the hem of Sidious' cowl was weighted with glittering black jewels, keeping all but the workings of his jaw obscured from view. The Sith Lord croaked, "I will contact you again, Count Dooku, when this business is finished."

Then he continued on his orbit of the conspirators, and Dooku turned away, his first task, the exposing of the temple's soft underbelly to predator claws, complete. He walked out of the room with the title Jedi Master sloughing off of him like the dead skin from a snake.

**A common interest **in the blockade of Naboo brought Qui-Gon, Ciaràn, Quinlan Vos, Aayla Secura, Ki-Adi Mundi, and Anakin together to a seating niche in the residence tower a few days later. Yellow light as natural as it came on Coruscant shone down on the salmon-colored couches and tiled floor. Ciaràn sat rather stiffly on the edge of a couch; Qui-Gon could sense nervousness and tension from him, if only because Quinlan was looking at him.

Anakin and Aayla were the polar opposites, draped over the adjoining backs of the couches like lizards lounging in the sun, chattering about the mission."Master Quinlan destroyed the transmitter for what controlled the battle droids, while I worked with a whole _army _of Gungans that had these energy-sphere weapons, and threw them at droids until they were all shut down--"

As soon as they made eye contact, Ki-Adi Mundi and Qui-Gon moved a few steps away into a conversation of their own.

"You can come and see him whenever you would like." Ki-Adi said, referring to Anakin. "We both know this isn't a conventional match, if any is." The Cerean was as old, at least older than Qui-Gon, with flinty eyes and a silver topknot. Qui-Gon knew little about his family life, except that it set him apart from any other Jedi that Qui-Gon had known—any save Anakin.

Theoretically, Ki-Adi understood attachment like few Jedi were permitted to do; because of the scarcity of males of his species, he had wives and children back on his homeworld, Cerea. He would not find Anakin's relationship with his mother completely foreign.

" I shouldn't," Qui-Gon replied.

But Ciaràn could sense that Qui-Gon wanted to. The Zabrak shuffled, unable to get out from under the unusual pressure Quinlan's gaze. Then he made himself met the Jedi Master's eyes, avoiding the distracting trails of traffic that could be seen outside the windows on either side of the standing Kiffar, and got a shifting of Quinlan's feet in return. Had Ciaràn done something wrong, or was his inability to make polite conversation a symptom rather than the main problem? He tried to dissect his own thoughts. He had no reason to feel unsettled here, quite the opposite. But when Anakin accidentally bumped up against him, tension coiled in the muscles of his shoulder and slid down to pull his hands into fists. Could this be a premonition in the Force?

"Master Vos," he said softly to Quinlan. "Something may be wrong—"

All of them glanced at the doorway as the Force alerted them to a flustered being rushing toward it. Aayla sat up, her lekku settling down neatly along her back, and Anakin mimicked her at-attention pose.

A blue-skinned Twi'lek male wearing a loose tunic skidded into the room. His bow was so quick it nearly tossed his lekku over his craggy forehead. "Masters! There's, ah, trouble on the roof of the main temple—someone's crashed a speederbike. You were the first I could get to—I, ah, she's going to fall!"

Qui-Gon was instantly in front of the man, his cloak sweeping. "Take us there. Who's going to fall? Ciaràn, stay here with the—no—"

"I'll take care of the kids," said Quinlan.

Aayla's "Can't I help?" faded into the distance as Ciaràn jogged after Qui-Gon and the Twi'lek. His nervousness must have been a premonition, then. The Twi'lek, he gathered from his clothing, must be one of the non-Force-users working for the temple; he responded to Qui-Gon's questions with breathless efficiency.

"Somehow, a teenager crashed into one of the spires; must've fallen from above. Her repulsorlift's shot and could drop her at any second—"

"What about EMTs?"

"No vehicles can get in unless we lower the shield. We'll have to go up in the lift."

Ciaràn felt a lie in the Force, a niggling feeling that his predicted dread had not yet come to pass. But the feeling faded as he, Qui-Gon, and Ki-Adi Mundi followed the civilian into a service turbolift that, with a smooth hissing sound, carried them upward.

While it was something that the occasional Padawan aspired to and gained, Ciaràn had never been on the first of the ziggurat's roofs. The four temple towers surrounded it, but the bases of two were obscured by the square second tier, and a landscape of pipes, vents, and shingles which crunched underfoot stretched out before Ciaràn like the scoured surface of a Coruscanti park. Ten meters up the spire closest to the rescue party, smoke billowed from a single-person craft which lurched as they watched. It looked as if the red speederbike's repulsorlifts had failed, sending it crashing into the side of the tower, then it slid down until the engine recovered and sent out sporadic bursts from the repulsors, keeping the vehicle stranded at its current height and likely at any moment to fail again and fall. Its driver, a Cathar woman wearing a purple jumpsuit, had been dislodged from the open cockpit at some point and now hung from one foot pedal, trying frantically to catch on to something else, coughing as the smoke wafted her way.

"I'll get her, Master, if you can be sure the bike stays steady," Ciaràn said, moving out into the full sunlight, focusing on breathing steadily as he ran toward the being in distress.

Qui-Gon kept pace. "Be sure not to _frighten_ her, Padawan—"

Ciaràn reached the base of the tower in the next moment and leapt, heedless of the gulf of air around him as he cleared the open space between the roof and the tower. Wind created a humming pressure in his ears. He landed on the curved, horizontal side of the tower—the material rough against his spidered fingers—and immediately pushed off again with arms and legs, harnessing the Force to whip the wind around him strong enough to direct his flight. It was exhilarating, to have both nothing physical around him and to be deathly certain that the Force would provide him whatever support he needed.

He landed on the seat of the speederbike, wind snapping at his cloaktails and billowing his wide sleeves. The bike rocked a little beneath his feet as he found his balance, but no more than if its repulsors were functioning. The wide-eyed Cathar looked up, whimpered.

"Grab my hand!" Ciaràn crouched and offered one ink-black palm. For a moment she just looked at him; he could see clearly that she did not want to release half of her hold on the narrow platform. "It'll be all right."

She bared her teeth—he saw a fang poke at her purple lips—in determination and lunged toward him. Their hands slipped, clasped. Ciaràn could see Qui-Gon below, looking up at him, hands raised to secure the bike with the Force, and Ki-Adi Mundi running, for some reason, away from both the tower and the lift. Qui-Gon spoke, but his words were whipped away by the wind. Ciaràn tried to delve into the Force to catch his meaning or warning, but—

He couldn't reach it. There was nothing there.

Alone in the universe, Ciaràn began to pull the Cathar woman up onto the seat in front of him as he looked around for what could possibly be causing this blindness. She latched onto his wrist with her other hand too, sinking claws in, and he grimaced and grabbed her elbow with his other hand to even out the weight.

None of the psychic warning he was used to came when she braced her knees against the side of the bike, took the clawed hand from his wrist to the handlebars, and twisted her entire body, wrenching him by the hand out of his seat and nearly over her shoulder. His legs, halfway across the seat when he had leaned over to pull her up, could find no purchase. She used her momentum more, pulled him entirely off of the bike. Something in his right shoulder slipped out of place. The ground lurched nauseatingly closer. But he couldn't sense her motives, just see her guileless eyes—

He fell for a split second, then turned around and caught the Cathar's ankle in both hands. His shoulder resettled itself with a painful lurch. Thus burdened, the Cathar moved into the bike's seat with a grace entirely inappropriate to her former distress, and as she did her face melted into one of a reptilian creature with shiny skin and vertical gill slits—a Clawdite, a shapeshifter. A moment later the face turned human, but Ciaràn just glimpsed it before he concentrated entirely on her foot and ankle. Adrenaline made the strain in his back, shoulders, and arms a distant thing, something for later. He let go as she started to kick, and grabbed onto the bike's footrest. The shapeshifter started the bike's engine with a roar at the same time as the deep treads of her boot-heel were coming down on his fingers.

He released the hold, instantly found a new one as the storage compartment behind the bike's seat whipped past him. He tucked himself as close to it and as far from the hot engine nacelles as he could, even as the bike was picking up speed and gaining altitude. An explosion behind him dragged his vision back and down for a moment—

Something the size of a thermal detonator had gone off on the roof. Fire mushroomed in a rainbow of reds and oranges directly ahead of an silver-blue armored man equipped with a jet pack, who was rocketing over the explosion and after the speederbike. Qui-Gon and Ki-Adi were nowhere to be seen, but Ciaràn could sense them, alive, on the outskirts of the conflagration. He saw a wriggling flash of yellow fall into the fire; a ysalamiri, that had probably been concealed on the speeder—on the trap—the whole time, and had likely been what Qui-Gon had tried to tell him about.

The Clawdite kicked at him again. She did not seem to be armed, and anyway was using both hands to send the bike speeding into more populous sections of road. Qui-Gon had been right about one thing; she had come in _over _the shield. The altitude was dizzying—speeders looked like specks, like lines and dots, like language, where far below them the surface of Corsucant was lost in layers of indistinct color. He needed to think of the drop not as _heartstoppingly terrifying_, but simply as _somewhere, in this current situation, that I do not want to go—_

The Clawdite rocked the bike, pitching and yawing it to the severest possible degree to try and shake him off. Ciaràn doggedly kept his grip, consumed with the thought of rearing up and pitching _her _over the side. But he did not want to kill, not unless he had to—

A blasterbolt narrowly missed his shoulder blades, hot enough against his skin that he knew it had parted fabric. The man with the jetpack was catching up. Ciaràn pulled himself up onto the narrow platform made by the bike's cargo compartments, was dropped to his knees by an abrupt turn, and stared at the blasterbolts heading toward him.


	7. Chapter 7

**VII**

Ciaràn reached for his lightsaber as the speeder bike juked beneath him, but his hand closed on empty air. He realized with a sinking feeling that the weapon was gone. It was not simply that he had not clipped it to his belt this morning, like it usually was. (Or was it? Now that he thought about it, there had been many lightsaber-less days.) It was as if he had forgotten where he put it, and could not remember, or as if he had never had one, or—

Blasterbolts pinged to the right and left; narrowly Ciaràn avoided them. He stretched one hand out and knocked the pursuer off course with the Force, just enough to send him, for a moment, out of control. His jet-trail scribed spirals.

The man was Mandalorian, Ciaràn noticed, or at least wore their armor, the narrow cheek-plates of the helmet glinting silver tinged blue like sun-washed snow. His kind were not to be trifled with. Another lurch negated Ciaràn's center of balance, but this time he flung his arm around Clawdite's neck.

She immediately began to twist around to try to throw him off, but he used her neck and shoulders as an anchor, and started to tighten his grip. Her head eased up as his forearm pressed against her windpipe. He turned to present the thin side of him to the Mandalorian-armored pursuer, his left hand raised and Clawdite in the crook of his right arm. He spoke close to the top of Clawdite's head; "Land, or I snuff your life out."

Although her breathing must have been getting difficult, she had kept on course, and the bike was approaching a tunnel free of any other traffic. Now she projected an affirmative into the Force as she tried to nod. But she was hiding something—a shiv, and the moment she took her hands off of the controls—

He pushed the back of her head against the storage compartment, dazing her a moment before her right hand came up ready to plunge a needle-thin dagger into his arm. The roof of the tunnel closed over them in a flash. More blasterbolts—but the Mandalorian was hesitant to shoot so near his partner, and they felt like warning shots.

The speeder grazed the floor of the tunnel and skidded to an abrupt stop. Ciaràn had known that she would try to shake him off one last time, and was ready when she killed the engine and threw herself out of the pilot's seat. He extricated his arm from around her neck quick enough to avoid another strain.

She landed crouched on the ground like a spider, elbows dipping toward the floor, and hurriedly got to her feet. Ciaràn sensed the Mando entering the tunnel at speed, and he jumped off the speeder, a plan forming in his mind.

He aimed a high kick a handspan away from the Clawdite's head as she got to her feet. It was designed not to hit, but to keep Ciaràn in the Mando's sights and to finally determine whether Clawdite had a blaster. It looked like, in her role as bait, she didn't; just the shiv, now a silver spike in her hand again.

As predicted, Mando shot again, but hit wide or too close to himself to put Clawdite in danger. _They aren't enemies—_

_What do they want? Both went after me, not the Jedi Masters._

Ciaràn raised his hands into the air. The Force pulled air like marionette ties, raising the blaster-smoke and obscuring himself and Clawdite as best he could. The gray miasma filled a quarter of the tunnel like a miniature storm cloud.

Clawdite lunged. Ciaràn dodged with a needlessly flashy side handspring, urging Mando to see the dim shapes of the fight. He could sense Mando's intent clearly, but Clawdite was quick and harder to read, alien thoughts flitting as fast as the shiv-augmented punches now pelting the air a few inches from his face. She scored one slice across his forearm, crystal-red droplets of blood trailing through the air the moment after.

The timing wasn't perfect, but Ciaràn was _tired _of this fight. Master Drallig always said that, when fighting two or more opponents, keep one in front of the other, so they get in one another's way and you only have to fight one at a time--

And so Ciaràn took a few long, calculated steps that put the speederbike's foreword-sweeping steering vanes between himself and Clawdite, and Mando fired at where he thought Ciaràn was just as Clawdite moved to her right and the smoke cleared.

The shots caught Clawdite in the shoulder, one just clipping her and flying by and the other sinking solid into her upper arm. Her scream wasn't entirely human, too echoing—

But he couldn't focus on that. Mando came half-running half-flying in, and Ciaràn got aboard the speederbike. The controls were still on standby, not locked, and he flipped a switch to get the engine running again. He turned the bike around as Mando discovered Clawdite on the ground.

One more thing to do. As he turned the bike around and picked up speed to exit the tunnel, Mando turned around, livid, to follow. He was going to cast a powered net—

Ciaràn raised a clenched fist and, with the Force, tore a pipe on Mando's jetpack in half. Steam and sparks escaped in a rapidly building cloud that replaced the blastersmoke.

As Mando wrestled the jetpack off his shoulders and turned back to Clawdite, Ciaràn squeezed the bike's accelerator and rocketed toward the temple.

**The bounty hunters **did not follow him. As he looked around and at the bike's tiny navicomp, trying to reconcile the highly illegal route they had taken to get to the tunnel with actual traffic lanes, he returned his breathing to its normal rate. As he took stock of the state of his body, pains made themselves known that had earlier been hidden in the fog of _now_ that took over during a fight. His shoulders, arms, and back ached and would surely do more of the same tomorrow; the scarring flesh on his side exhibited the stretching pain particular to burns. He wrapped the sleeve of his tunic, as tight as he could with one hand and the movement of the bike, around the forearm that was stinging and bleeding in harmless jewels.

Not bad for one _unarmed _man against two.

This sent a smile skirling across Ciaràn's face. But it also brought up an odd point; why _hadn't _he had his lightsaber? Master Jinn should have chastised him for wearing formal robes without it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd worked with it, which meant that Master Drallig should have noticed too.

More mysteries—why had the bounty hunters gone after him? The only _important _thing he'd ever done was investigate Naboo and Tatooine, and Qui-Gon had been there as well. But the setup had been so complex—the faux speeder crash, the second bounty hunter lying in wait. To attack so close to the temple at all was ambitious.

He merged the speederbike into the appropriate traffic lane a few congested blocks from the Jedi Temple. His mind wondered as he considered asking Master Qui-Gon about these things, and as it did his thoughts seemed to fetch up against an idea he couldn't quite catch. Like he was supposed to do something or meet someone now that the fight was done. The Force pointed him in a direction more relational than physical, and as vague as it sounds.

But he had to shake that impression as well; it would lead him nowhere but into inefficiency.

The fight was a safer, more solid subject of thought. He knew he had done well. (Although belated vertigo was striking him now; casually he looked at the vista around him and felt a rush of fear as if he were falling.) Jedi had their priorities; he had succeeded in not killing the bounty hunters. But he had tricked them, put the Clawdite in the Mando's line of fire. There had been little else to do, and yet he thought that if he explained the action out of context, it would be labeled as not the Jedi way.

(_Did that matter?,_ muttered the part of his brain that had been tugged in the directionless direction. _Does the past matter, when in the present these post-battle chemicals are washing through your brain, urging you to savour the feeling of triumph?) _

**Ciaràn's commlink beeped **just as he eased the speeder into the temple's parking sward. It displayed two missed messages, both from Qui-Gon; one had arrived during the fight and had said reinforcements were on the way, but the Jedi had been just a few minutes too late to either see the fight or get to the bounty hunters before they escaped into the bowels of Coruscant. The second message said to meet back at the Temple, and must have been sent once Qui-Gon could sense that Ciaràn was still alive. A quick message back told the Master where Ciaràn was now.

Master Vos was waiting at the entrance to the temple for him when Ciaràn arrived. The Kiffar's greeting was a curt "Medical center."

On the way to the medward, Ki-Adi Mundi and a nervous-feeling Qui-Gon joined the party. Qui-Gon looked Ciaràn over. "You're alright, Padawan?"

"Yes Master. I fought the bounty hunters off, and they escaped the scene."

"Good job."

"It was no difficulty at all."

The three Masters stood around him as Ciaràn sat on a table in the medward and the Mon Calamarian healer sterilized and wrapped the wound on his arm. His tunic, Ciaràn realized with dismay, was ruined; blood on the sleeve, and the back slit open.

"Master," He asked the first question he could extricate from the cloud of them. "why did the bounty hunters concoct such a complicated scheme?"

Qui-Gon looked off into the distance for a moment. The Calamarian completed the wrapping and removed the touch of her cool hands from his arm. She would not meet his eyes—he couldn't recall if he'd seen her around before. "It will be fine in a few days. Do not overexert yourself. The tattoos may need to be redone."

"That's fine," he replied, trying for flippant. It was no problem; a handful of the lines of tattooing had been marred in various exercises or missions.

The healer practically fled, only turning to nod at Qui-Gon when the Master spoke.

"Thank you, Bant," Qui-Gon said, then turned back to Ciaràn after the Calamarian had left. "We need to know two things; how they got in and what they were after."

"They were after me," said Ciaràn.

"And they got in through the sublevels," Ki-Adi said. "The ysalamiri came from our stock."

"Why do we keep those things?" Quinlan muttered, with flat, half-serious affectation.

"Just in case," the Cerean replied, "or for training."

"Because they are part of the life web of the Force," said Qui-Gon. "The fact that they don't touch it is, in its own way, a touch—an interaction, or reaction.

"A jury of Masters will question the sublevel staff," said Quinlan.

"That Twi'lek who brought us the message," Ciaràn said. "I sensed something unsettling about him."

"Then we will start with him," Qui-Gon said.

Quinlan nodded.

Ciaràn looked over at Qui-Gon, wanting to ask about the lightsaber as well as the method he had used to get away from Clawdite and Mando. "Can I talk to you alone?"

"Of course." Qui-Gon nodded, and the other two Masters eased out of the room.


	8. Chapter 8

**VIII **

Qui-Gon braced for the questions that were coming. The Council had discussed with him what he should do as the Sith that Ciaràn had been learned what had been done to him. It would be impossible to forestall that eventuality forever. Kit, Quinlan, and Ki-Adi had been briefed in the same way. However, Qui-Gon knew the randomness of the universe; there was no way to know what questions would be asked, and the bounty hunters had been entirely unexpected.

Why had they appeared? _To keep the reformed Sith from giving the Jedi any information_ was a logical answer, and it meant that somehow the hidden Sith was keeping track of his apprentice. He, then, would have hired them, albeit indirectly. Or perhaps the two were not bounty hunters at all, and the ur- Ciaràn had made enemies who had simply taken an opportunity and not entirely known the full extent of it. But the weaponry of the two had fit the usual description of bounty hunters, and none of the Jedi had been able to sense strong emotion from them. While emotion was the leading cause of violence in the galaxy, desire for credits was the second.

The very nervousness that Qui-Gon and so many of the Jedi showed around Ciaràn could make the former Sith suspicious. Qui-Gon swept his own mind with fortifying thoughts. "Yes, Padawan?"

Ciaràn took a moment to collect his thoughts, but where another being might have looked around at the room in the interim, he kept his eyes on Qui-Gon. The Sith-colors were gone from them now, the Jedi Master noticed, leaving a shiny brown. "I have misplaced my lightsaber."

Qui-Gon had talked to Cin Drallig about this. "Your new one, you mean? Master Drallig has some of the parts, to replace the saber you lost on Naboo. We'll gather other parts as we can."

Confusion slackened Ciaràn's jaw but did not touch his still-severe eyes. Qui-Gon trusted that the Zabrak was sorting through to a memory the Council had given him, of a CIS destroyer droid cracking the silver shell with the weight of its pincer-foot. He found himself thinking of how he was unfamiliar with Ciaràn's movements and reactions. _He is not Obi-Wan. But I can grow used to this._

"I remember—it was stepped on by a droid," Ciaràn said. He gave a tight, sheepish smile.

Qui-Gon looked calmly down. "You were weary; some disorientation can be expected one thousand meters above the surface of Coruscant."

"Master," Ciaràn said, with a distant affect, "Is it within the bounds of the Jedi way to use one enemy against another?"

The abrupt change of subject marked a change of state in Ciaràn; a curiosity. Qui-Gon realized that something must have happened when the Zabrak was facing the bounty hunters, but he thought first of the Sith master. He could answer, _The Council believes that it is._ He said, "Tell me more."

"I drew fire from one bounty hunter in order for it to hit the other. I did not want to kill them, but had to get away."

"First, _bounds_ is not an apt word. The dark side is not freedom, is not a part of the Force which the light is without. The dark side _lacks _what the light has—knowledge and benefit for all beings. Actions such as the one you took are the lesser of two evils," Qui-Gon said slowly, mulling over his words. "I think you did the best thing possible, although we must always be careful not to injure beings when it can be avoided. All creatures have value, although their larger effect on the galaxy must also be measured."

After a moment, Ciaràn said, "I will think on this."

Qui-Gon smiled. Yoda had once told him that an answer such as "I will think on this" was often more useful to the Padawan—and more sincere—than the more common "I understand." Understanding was achieved most thoroughly through difficulty. He said, "I suggest you go back to the room and meditate. Restore your mind."

Ciaràn replied, "I can't rest now. We need to find out why we were attacked."

"Master Vos and I will talk to the sublevel staff. You ought to rest."

He could sense Ciaràn's displeasure, but also that the command had clicked like a lock into his thoughts. Ciaràn said, "Yes, Master." He walked out of the room with a detached air, his shoulders slumped. Ki-Adi would be lurking about to see him back to his quarters.

The moment after he crossed the threshold, Bant, the Mon Calamarian healer who had been one of Obi-Wan's best friends, emerged from behind the partition. Loudly she said, 'Excuse me, Master Jinn."

Qui-Gon sat down on the crinkly material of the table that Ciaràn had vacated. He should not have pained her this way, by bringing Ciaràn in when there had been no one but her in the emergency suite. And yet he could have done nothing else. Perhaps the Force had orchestrated the encounter—and yet he felt pain wash off of her in waves, and wished as well as he could that it had not.

Bant glided toward him, uncapped sadness torrentially spilling into the Force, and Qui-Gon found himself wondering whether it was physically possible for Mon Calamari to cry. He remembered Bant as one of Obi-Wan's friends, first Tahl's and then Kit Fisto's Padawan, a girl who exuded kindness. She was smart; healers had to be, to learn and practice everything from binding wounds to performing minor surgery assisted by the Force. Blunt words flowed from her now, fetched up against the slick, black rocks of fact, and sank to dark depths. "He killed Obi-Wan." Her hands, webbed and clawed but dexterous, rose and fell.

Qui-Gon said softly, "I am sorry. Very sorry, Padawan."

Silence.

"We are trying to prevent him from killing anyone else."

She sat down beside him. "I miss Obi-Wan, Master Jinn. I wish none of you had gone on that mission—although I know that anything could have happened anyway. I shouldn't be so attached. But I couldn't—" She grimaced, and again Qui-Gon saw her small, neat claws twitch as they had near Ciaràn's skin as she had applied the bandage. How she had counted the small ways she could have hurt him.

All Qui-Gon could say was, "I miss him too," let his voice trail away into an imagined whispering echo that compounded his loss. "It has been difficult. Now…" and as Qui-Gon spoke he realized that he had been keeping these words hidden even from himself. "I had grown inured. I have not thought of Obi-Wan in too long."

"I visited the memorial wall. As strange as it sounds, I wish I had been there for the funeral. I guess it'd feel more like closure."

Qui-Gon said nothing, knew that she felt his agreement in the Force.

"We should arrange something. A memorial."

He could picture it, a small group down in the catacombs, remembering Obi-Wan again as Qui-Gon had in the desert. Cleaning the wound, no matter how it stung, so that it could heal. "Yes we should."

Again. a moment of quiet. Bant said, "What now?"

"…I don't know." _This is numbness. I expected to feel it, but not for it to be so insidious. I haven't thought about him in so long._

_I'm so sorry, Obi-Wan._

Bant's cold hand brushed his, twitched away. "There is no death, there is the Force."

He appreciated the gesture. Be he needed to stand, to go be alone (except he wouldn't be alone, needed to talk to the Council--), needed to get out from under the crumbling ceiling of sadness. "Let's speak of this further, later. May the Force be with you, Bant." Those were not the words he was really looking for, but no one said "Good luck" among the Jedi. The Force, Qui-Gon thought, had always been with them as their sixth sense, and yet at times it changed nothing. But no one said "Life carries on."

But then he grasped the words. He said, softly, "There is death, Bant. And yet we keep finding reasons to live."

She flung herself forward, embraced him quickly, retreated to a more socially acceptable distance. But he reached out, placed a hand on the rough fabric of the shoulder of her cloak for a moment. They stood and mourned, drawing strength from one another, until he turned away.

**Qui-Gon, Mace **Windu, and Eeth Koth confronted the slate-skinned Twi'lek serviceman in a small conference room. It was overkill, Qui-Gon thought. The Twi'lek and the other being on his shift, a Pho Ph'eahian in a gray coverall, exuded fear as they stared across the table at the Jedi. The only other fixture in the room was a protocol droid, which would lead the temple workers in and out of the semi-public parts of the edifice in which they would be questioned.

Mace asked their names.

"Lott Nin."

"Te'bot."

Mace glanced over at the protocol droid, which would also be recording the conversation. Qui-Gon thought for a moment how harsh a separation there existed between the Jedi and the temple workers. The keepers of the lower levels had as much personality and life as Shmi or Anakin Skywalker, and yet he knew none of them.

"Lott Nin," Mace drew out the name with a quizzical tone. "How did you discover the beings on the roof on the day of the attack?"

The Twi'lek looked off into the distance, wrinkled lips sliding over sharp teeth. "I talked to someone who suggested I go look. Then I knew I needed more help, so I brought Te'Bot with me to notify someone in the temple."

Te'bot's eyes were wide; his four hands shook on the table's surface. "I don't remember meeting you. Those few hours are…I don't know what I was doing then." His Force presence skirled with fear, and Qui-Gon could sense the truth of the words.

Mace asked, "Did you bring a ysalamiri out of the sublevels?"

The Twi'lek shook his tentacled head, but the other's eyes lit up with recognition. "Yes. It was the right thing to do. It…. I don't know why."

_So they were mindtricked by someone in league with the Sith, who would then have been in communication with the attackers. _Qui-Gon glanced at the others on his side of the table.

Mace and Eeth rose. "Thank you," said Eeth, and gestured for Qui-Gon to follow them out. But when the Council members reached the door, Qui-Gon paused by the two temple workers, disgusted by the thought of leaving them with no idea what had happened. He met Lott Nin's purplish eyes.

"Someone used Jedi power to gain access to the roof; you are guilty of nothing. Petition for damages from the Republic if you wish." And he hurried to join the other Masters.

They walked along the vaulted hall outside the conference room, where orange light filtered in through strips of transparisteel to lay hot in columnar pools against the floor.

Qui-Gon seized upon an idea that might both forestall any other attacks on the temple and keep the Council from interfering with Ciaràn's new training to much. He only realized now that it had been lurking in the back of his mind for days, like an idea which hides in the subconscious until it is revealed in dream. "Ciaràn and I might relocate for a while, to Ilum or another world strong in the light side, to avoid further danger to the temple."

Mace replied, "Then we too would be unable to study him. He should remain here."

Qui-Gon imagined two predators fighting for the same meal; the Jedi and the Sith pulling at Ciaràn's mind until it tore; or until the Zabrak fought back, struck at whichever faction was closest. "But he isn't a datapad that we need time to hack. Master Yoda told me that he might one day be engrained in the light or neutral Force enough to recall his former life and tell us about it willingly."

"It would be incorrect to assume that he has ever experienced a neutral mindset before, or even that he is capable of doing so," Mace said. "Perhaps he could, but the datapad analogy _was _apt."

Qui-Gon sensed the two Council members recalling their mindmeld of twelve, dipping into the edge of it, and he felt pulses of regret that he had no chance of joining it. Things could have been so different. But nor could he ever imagine fully agreeing with them.

Eeth said, "When we focused the Force on the Sith apprentice in the Council chamber, we could not determine who the Sith Master was or their location, but we did…feel the ways in which the Iridonian's mind had been conditioned by the Master. Certain stimuli were keyed to certain actions, like a dog trained to sit at the sound of a spoken command. Possessed of those memories he would be unable, psychologically, to _not _see Jedi as enemies, because his master had, in the taming, instilled that belief. We worked around those blocks and commands, but they still exist."

The word _taming _applied to a living being repulsed Qui-Gon, but he remembered too that one of the first things Ciaràn had done upon waking had been to try to hit him. "But do you know all the stimuli, all the cues? I should have known about this."

"Most of them you do," Mace said. "We told you not to give him a lightsaber."

"That's a primary stimulus?"

"Secondary, actually. The fight itself is the primary; he would be hard pressed not to match aggression with aggression."

"Darkness is complete in him," Eeth Koth said. "Every move he makes in a fight is designed to meet an end, to kill—the perfectly focused warrior, in a way."

_The Zabraks are a strong race_, Qui-Gon thought, _but this can make them narrow-minded in their definition of "warrior". _And although he knew that none of them really understood how Ciaràn's implanted memories worked with his real ones, he saw a gap in their logic. "He did not kill the bounty hunters."

"Because he was Ciaràn then," Eeth replied, "not who he had been."

Mace saw the lift ahead where Qui-Gon would leave them for the dormitories. "For now," he said, "things should stay as they are. Guide Ciaràn through the Jedi way. You may begin with him the construction of a new lightsaber, but do not complete it."

Qui-Gon nodded, moved off, let the lift door slide between himself and their severe eyes. _I_, he thought, _am severe as well._

It would be so easy to simply leave the temple on a starship, go somewhere owned neither by Jedi nor Sith nor the liberating uncertainty that admirable, charismatic, mysterious Dooku represented.

But Quinlan had told him; the newsfeeds had told him—that although the Seperatists had been routed at Naboo, the destruction of a droid control ship did not happy taxpayers make. There were still civilians funding and organizing the anti-Republic movement, and the Jedi did not fight only for the Republic, but for stability, equality, and the preservation of life. The Council would stand for these things even longer than it would stand for the name of the Republic, and he thought that the new Chancellor Palpatine would as well. Until there was a better, more proven place for these things, Qui-Gon would stay.

When he returned to his apartment Ciaràn was carrying across the common room a tray of tea, favoring his wounded arm. Qui-Gon looked out the viewport to see the first bright glint of starlight on the orbital mirrors as inky evening asserted itself over the bright cityscape of Coruscant.


	9. Chapter 9

**IX**

Darth Sidious summoned Dooku to him to ascertain where the plan had gone wrong.

The former Jedi looked none at all like he had been exiled from his home; his umber cloak showed not a mote of dust. And of course, Sidious knew, he really hadn't; the coffers of Serenno had eagerly opened for him. And so he stood like royalty in the red-lit foyer of the Works, looking calmly about.

So serene for a myrmidon who had failed in his first task! For a moment Sidious pictured Dooku doubled over beneath a maelstrom of lightning, howling like a wounded animal—

But this man did not respond to brute threats—or, to be more precise, they were not the best net to cast around him. Instead, Sidious quieted, staring into Dooku's eyes, every inch a leader speaking to an underling. But his words were conciliatory, designed to make Dooku think Sidious respected him. Anything else, and the pride that was one strut which held up Dooku's tendency toward the dark side would rankle.

"Greetings, Count Dooku."

"Lord Sidious."

Sidious would not bandy words either, and he could not avoid a mocking, wheedling tone slipping in, as if Dooku were a child that wanted to know it was felt sorry for. "Your bounty hunters have failed."

"And now they know this. Your former apprentice put up more of a fight than was expected."

Sidious could sense that 'your apprentice' was a jab, but also felt a bit proud; Darth Maul's talent for combat_ should_ have been more than enough to keep him out of an enemy grasp. But the endeavor needed to go through.

Next, Sidious needed to test the Jedi himself. The fact remained that he was expected to be in the Senate complex, a mere hoverbus stop from the Temple, most of the day. He would think on this further.

In neither the Force nor his plans had this complication been foreseen. It made him envision lightning again. But that vision was not permitted to effect reality, as Force-strong desires were wont to do.

"Be ready for further instruction," He said to Dooku, "whether it be about Darth Maul or the Jedi Sifo-Dyas." _You will need a new name soon._

Dooku sketched a careful bow, never breaking eye contact, and turned away.

**Ciaràn knelt in **the pool of light by the window of his quarters, the diamond-colored crystal on the floor in front of his folded legs reflecting the russet brown of his tunic. Qui-Gon stood beside him looking down. Softly he spoke.

"I brought this crystal here from Ilum many years ago, for a time in which I might need it. Meditate on the distance it has crossed, and that which you may yet cross."

Ciaràn shut his eyes, pulled his awareness out of and beyond the glassy warmth.

He fell into a vision of the main doors of the Jedi temple. The golden sheets of thick material carved with primal images of heroic beings flickered, first close as if he stood at their feet, then from rooftops away. The vision did not feel like meditation, but like memory—a memory of a daydream. He felt himself walk through the temple doors as they swung open, scraping across the ground and dislodging grit.

He walked through the doors, hiding his Force sense but unable to keep the strange sense of _anticipation _from manifesting in the clenching and unclenching of a fist. There was no one in the halls, although Force presences flowed all around, and he prowled the high-ceilinged until he came to a balcony and looked down at two brown-robed figures.

In the way of dreams, he knew that this place did not really exist in the temple, or at least he had never seen it, but there was sense, there was _rightness_, in that it was there. And in the way of dreams, the Jedi below had no faces, just blurred suggestions of color that, if he had had to name them, would have been called faces. Clearer were their backs and shoulders, and the brown folds of their cowls.

He would strike them right there. The neck was vulnerable on any being that kept its brain in its head.

He jumped off the balcony, struck one of the Jedi with an elbow that sent him and it into a blurred tangle on the floor. His hands seemed to move instinctively, pushing the Jedi down with the momentum of the fall so that something important cracked when the it hit the ground. Ciaràn rose from the body, lightsaber scything to scarlet life in his hands so that the Jedi in front of him tripped a few steps back and to the side. Ciaràn struck while an emerald lightsaber was still blooming in the other's hands.

And so it went. Sometimes Ciaràn was invisible to his opponent until he killed them; sometimes there were what felt like minutes of back-and-forth battles until Ciaràn broken through the other's fighting style. He left corpses on the floor like fallen leaves, and he had wanted this for so long, this autumn of the Jedi—

(He opened his eyes, saw the plasteel wall of his room, released a loud breath.)

--Leaves falling, neon colors clearing the eyes of their complacent summer dust. A field of lightsabers now, and he was afraid of none of them. The Force sense of the temple—a concoction of individual personalities and that which amplified them, the bubbling nexus of the light side—moved around them like fog or a sea.

(He felt it, so familiar, although it brought images of this room, of Master Qui-Gon, of a month and no more.)

Of _waiting_, moving with _wants _that swept over him like tides, of looking from afar (the Jedi temple framed by readouts of distance and zoom and droid networks whose eyes he used) and from an imagined closeness. Of the hordes of Jedi he would battle.

But he had to wait. Had to smooth down raised hackles and turn, imagined eyes of Jedi prickling the skin on the back of his neck, to breathe in his Master/mentor/teacher's Force presence in order to calm himself and be able to walk away.

(He looked around the room, expression slack as he focuses inward, seeing the endless skyline outside the window and the glinting curves at its brink.)

The endless skyline with its girders and black towers stripped of their outer layers, glassless windows, no people around, but for scattered destitute souls who had learned to stay away from the haunts of the Sith—

Ciaràn _woke up_, lucid all the while, broke his stare away from many-eyed Coruscant and stood, fluid, possessed, by one all-important revelation.

"Master!" his voice rasped, whispered, strove again to sound loud enough to be heard as he clutched at the doorframe, shoulders hunched as though he were lifting a great weight. "I know where the Sith Master is."

**"A storm is **coming, Ani," Jira had said. "I can feel it in my bones."

Anakin understood, now, how she had felt, how dread knowledge sank and sank until it became something physical enough to have a weight and mass, to displace the heart. He looked up from his mathematics. "Master Ki-Adi?"  
But the words were only absorbed into the walls of the study niche where Master and Padawan had been sitting by Master Jinn's and Ciaràn's apartment. A handful of chimes sent out their sound from the breeze of central air. The Force too rang softly, then thundered in his head. Some else's thoughts were in turmoil, and they dragged Anakin out of the room like a tractor beam. He ended up at the door to Master Jinn's suite.

The Jedi Master himself stood outside of the room at an angle, with his hands in his sleeves. Inside, Ciaràn and Master Mundi sat on couches facing one another. Anakin could see Ciaràn's head bowed, the hooked horns stark in red rings set off from black skin. He knew that most Zabraks, like Master Koth or a couple of the visitors to Watto's shop, marked their faces with tattoos, but could not tell which color on Ciaràn was ink and which was skin. Like an optical illusion where focusing on one part created a picture independent of another part.

He realized, _I can't feel him panicking in the Force any longer. But my attention was drawn to him, now and when I first knew something was wrong._

Qui-Gon put a hand on Anakin's shoulder. "Do not become absent-minded. We've tried to shield Ciaràn from the Force; it might distract you. He had a vision."

Anakin took a few steps away from the door, as if something invisible might at any moment barrel through it. "Of what, Master Jinn?"

"Of the Sith Lord."

**He told Master **Mundi everything the vision had shown him, and felt like a traitor twice over. The words left his thoughts feeling empty. He looked at Master Mundi and did not want to ask why the Force had chosen _him _for this vision.

He said, "They were in the Works. The abandoned factory district."

Mundi said, "This information is invaluable."

"I know; it will be very useful. We need to find the Sith. But how do we know I saw true?"

"It's the only lead we have."

Ciaràn looked down at his knees, grimaced. "I'd like to talk to Master Jinn now."

Mundi nodded and looked at Qui-Gon, who patted Anakin Skywalker on the shoulder and sent him away before entering the room. He sat down, spoke gruffly. "What do you need?"  
Ciaràn searched for words. "The vision was like a representation of the Sith's desires." But how to tell that, unlike the insular logic of dreams, some traits of the feelings in the vision remained, as sensible—no, inexorable—as convictions were in waking life? It was as if invisible lines connected him to things and people around him, and defined them—defined the Jedi as _targets_, the room as a prison. He took a deep breath.

And felt that Qui-Gon needed to know this. He permitted the Jedi into his thoughts.

Immediately, Qui-Gon said "The Force puts burdens on some of us. Jedi are not tempted to evil less than other beings, but our resistance must be made stronger. Don't let your burdens become you. They pass through. Stay here for now, Ciaràn; Master Mundi will be with you. I'll get this information to the Council." And he stood up, swept away agitated.

Ciaràn closed his hands into fists, started at the wall. The vision would soon, he hoped, let him go. Until then—

"Master Mundi. Why didn't Master Jinn come when I called?"

"He is still distressed from the loss of Obi-Wan, and was unsure how to act."

Until then—

He murmured, "I am getting tired of hearing about Obi-Wan."

Had it really been a vision? The conviction and desire…the pure hate for the Jedi. It sent tension through him, like the feeling just before shivers flooded his spine. The Force could have given it to him to help the effort against the Sith.

But then, why make him question that effort?

The Sith assassins desires had been so…simple. The attack begat pleasure (the adrenaline of combat, of striving—the confidence of his body reacting Just as he desired no time at all after he thought of that desire, like a pilot with the greatest spacecraft he had ever flown--) and so he attacked. No waiting. No talking, while words seemed always more and more like needless décor on the solid stone of communicating through action and the Force. Like a slick surface which he would need to sink spikes into before he could climb.

He took a deep breath. None of that mattered now. He looked up at Master Mundi, tried for calm.

But he did not know what to do now. The lightsaber crystal he had been meditating with had surely rolled under the bed somewhere, and he thought that he ought to pick it up. Then Qui-Gon would return from the Council chamber and they would begin to hunt the Sith.

A hunt would sooth his urge for a challenge perfectly.

He stood, headed for his room to find the crystal. Behind him, Master Mundi flicked his gaze around like an alert watchdog.

**Qui-Gon had been **planning on spending time with Anakin after Ciaràn had settled into meditation, but after their interruption, for the first time in a long time, he felt that he needed to speak to the Council immediately. Their plan had succeeded—if the Sith could truly be found in the Works, which was a likely enough place on congested Coruscant.

And by telling the Council now, he would be, in a way, avenging Obi-Wan's death. When he walked out of the door of his suite his first thought had been to go to Bant. _Let us build a bonfire for Obi-Wan. Let us throw chemicals and unguents in to paint the flames violet and neon-green, let us mourn him with wails like savages because of the stupid, simple way in which he died—_

_Died_, when all Qui-Gon had needed to do was _turn around—_

And because of this he ignored the feelings in the back of his head, the suggestions that he was about to do something coldly cruel to Ciaràn, the niggling idea that he ought take his own advice and let the anger go. He had felt, in his apartment, the spirit of the man who had killed Obi-Wan, vivid as if a red lightsaber had ignited in the room. As he paced toward the lift, anger seemed to be the only thing that would make any progress.


	10. Chapter 10

X.

Rali stumbled out of bed and into his Jedi uniform. He shook his head of shades-of-green tentacles to wake himself up, washing sensation through them the way a human would take a deep breath. Any time was too early for Galactic Politics, even if the class was held in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. The garden and expanses of water kept him awake better than classroom walls.

When he reached the place where the class met, other Padawans were there already, sitting with legs folded on the flagstones. Their postures would slacken and vary as time went on and they began to wish they had chairs. Ciaràn arrived at nearly the same time Rali did, with one of the thick, brown traveling cloaks thrown over his shoulders as if he were leaving on a mission for a cold world. Rali said hello in passing, but the Zabrak did not react, only walking by so close that Rali had to step aside or be clipped by his shoulder. The Zabrak sat down unseeing. Rali followed with a similar disregard for the teaching Master's words.

Both of them, not helped by the other's distance, were more conscious of the slow passage of time than of the day's lesson. When the Master dismissed the class, Ciaràn left without looking back.

**After he told** the Council the location of the Sith training ground, Qui-Gon felt empty of facts. He was left with something like shame, the sense that Obi-Wan would never have wanted him to feel vengeful…but also with a peace, like now that Ciaràn had done what the Council wanted, both he and Qui-Gon could move on with their lives.

He could not keep from being attached to Obi-Wan, if mourning signified attachment. But he could replace some of that mourning with taking care of his new Padawan.

New Padawan, who needed his Sith memories no longer, who Qui-Gon had seen sit serenely in class or doing his studies in their apartment, who Qui-Gon had seen embrace Cin Drallig after they fought until their hands shook with exhaustion. Qui-Gon_ liked_ Ciaràn…enough that he wanted to spare him what he had once been.

The Council would not want it. But Qui-Gon could see a dark future in which Ciaràn's memory was tripped by an argument or a fight, and he had no time to _think_, and simply turned.

And so, Qui-Gon would try to hurt Ciaràn a little less, and take the responsibility for the result himself.

**Rali could not** know what sensations and questions weighed on Ciaràn as he walked toward the courtyard where Master Jinn often waited to meet him, ignoring the overhanging trees with their dappled shadows that usually gave him a sense of peace. The identity and characteristics of the assassin whose identity he had so easily assumed during the meditation filled his thoughts. Why had he _become_ the assassin—slipped him on like second skin—instead of simply seeing him? Why had _he _had the vision at all, instead of one of the much wiser Jedi Masters or Council members? It was Masters who were searching for the Sith, not him—he had enough to think about; classes, working with Master Drallig to hone his fighting skills, preparing to build a lightsaber. It was if he had overheard someone speak of the hunt, then forgotten he had heard it until it appeared in his dreams days later. But the dream had been redolent with the Force.

There had been much to admire about the assassin. Skill and technique, but also intensity and focus. Killing had lit sparks of pleasure in his brain that did not fog up thought, but rather sharpened it, became a fiery catalyst for power. Inasmuch he was no match for Master Yoda or Mace Windu, with their deeper grasp of the Force, Ciaràn would have been hard pressed to decide whether the Sith would best a practiced Jedi like Qui-Gon. But he fit perfectly into the mold of quiet, quick slaughter—and he _hated_ the Jedi with an uncomplicated hate that translated into action without any hesitation. Asking him to reconsider would be like asking a speeder to slow down as the accelerator was pressed.

This made Ciaràn dip his head and rue the demon that seemed to lurk behind his eyes, but a mind like that would also make life, would make _feeling_, so much _easier_—

He found Qui-Gon kneeling on a lawn made cool by overhanging leaves. Ciaràn mimicked his pose beside him, trying not to focus on the talk of other apprentices who passed by on their way out of class. Although he understood their language perfectly, it was beneath his interest to pay attention to the words. They were like static…like bubbles sent out by the fish that circled the hook.

Qui-Gon spoke casually, matter-of-factly. "Something is disturbing you, Padawan."

"Yes, Master. The Sith…linger with me." He felt that these words were enough, that Qui-Gon _must _feel how the other personality was spilling out of him, infecting the world, as immediate as a groundquake beneath his feet.

"I have met many beings in my lifetime," Qui-Gon said. "Some have bodies which we could closely compare to an animal's. But the Verpine or Kushiban or Wookiees whom I meet prove, over and over, that sentient beings are all separated from animals by something, whether it be their generosity, or pursuit of knowledge, or their search for meaning in life. I tell you this so that you remember that we all, whether we are Sith or Jedi or those without the Force, choose to be like sentients or like animals."

Ciaràn waited for the words to help.

When they did not, Qui-Gon continued. "I was not instructed to tell you this." He met Ciaràn's eyes. "In a way, you saw true. Before the Jedi brought you to the Temple, you served as the Sith Lord's apprentice."

"Before?" There was no _before_.

"A little over two months ago."

The memories—the feelings—of the Sith felt as strong as any of the Jedi (except the sacking of the Temple was false, a daydream, a future—that was not how he had been captured.) But memories did not come rushing back. Revelation sank over him like a shroud and smothered words.

"We…the Council…needed your help."

Anger wormed its way into Qui-Gon's thoughts now, and Ciaràn tried to remember his real name, hoping somewhere that he knew it already—he could not seem to blink; his expression had taken on the surprise that his mind could not quite contain. But then, was he really surprised? He had suspected…but he had never truly thought about having once _been _that person. That construct of thought had also wielded his _hands—_it was when he began to wonder whether that was more or less frightening than it—and the Council—wielding his mind that he truly felt how luxurious was simplicity.

And simplest of all was anger.

"What did they want? They sacrificed me to it. And what do I do now, with no identity-- with two identies?" What had he _done_? He couldn't _remember_—no names, no places with names, just another _Master _and the sense of a call that he had felt after he fought the two bounty hunters and rode the speederbike back toward the Temple…a call that came from a different direction.

Qui-Gon said, "Answers will not come easily. I…do not know."

Ciaràn passed a hand over his face, struck suddenly with the sense that his bones would shift and he would no longer recognize the shape of himself.

"I thought it would be best to tell you now instead of at a time when it would come as a greater shock. The Council will frown on this."

And Qui-Gon looked at Ciaràn and did not know what he would do, and Ciaràn wondered whether he would be acting predictably if he just _hit _the Jedi right now, for keeping this from him, from doing this to him…

But he would, instead of feeling sorry for himself, shake himself off and see the world anew and decide who he was—

He would. "I need time to think." The _I _was swallowed up by the whispery tenor of a breathless voice.

"Of course." Qui-Gon also rose, but by the time he could look down on Ciaràn the Zabrak was away, calculating the quickest way out of the labyrinth of fountains. He passed into the hall, saw Rali waiting there.

The Ho'Din tried "What's wrong?" but Ciaràn swept past. He knew his own Force emanations, confusion and frustration and a pure desire to _lash out_, and so, knowing how, he shut them off. If Jedi turned their heads as he passed it was because of his flaring cloak and hurried footfalls, or because one did not usually see a Padawan venturing into the hangars alone.

He scanned the ships, fighters and passenger craft, and realized that he was about to steal one (a realization that a moment later slipped back into the flood of thoughts that, rushing through him like water, became one seething whitecap of _must get out of the smell/sense/influence of this place.) _The high doors to the landing/launching platform were closed. Only as he looked around—flick-flick, his lips jumping back from his teeth-- for their controls did he discover Rali standing behind him.

Other presences floated to his awareness. _Must go somewhere alone, influence-less, away from all these Jedi minds-targets-friends. _Qui-Gon was hurrying toward him, and a weak-in-the-Force dockmaster manned a computer near the ships.

Ciaràn headed for the weak point. Thoughts badgered him, floating up from meditative afternoons. _I killed Jedi—that female fencing on the girders, and another…(he felt sand-grit and suns-glare and no recognizable presence)That's terrible. But what a glory it would be—how can impulses be so polar yet occur at the same moment? They are all so right. Can't choose—why _think?_—_

And so, like his Force presence, he shuts thinking off. Awareness of time goes with it.

He is upon the human dock-attendant before either of them could react. His fingers strain around the man's neck, the black tattoos running down along the sinews of his hand like armor. The human's shoulders smack against the computer console.

Rali, close behind him—and the dock-minder's fingers scrabbling for his own lightsaber. Ciaràn grips, spins, whips the human around into Rali's path and snags his lightsaber in the process. The two slam into each other and strike the floor with a _thud_, careening back on the dockworker's momentum and fetching up against a ship's hull. For a moment Ciaràn stumbles, standing out of balance, over the tangled forms of the two_. _The Jedi have been keeping him in _classes--!_

Suddenly Qui-Gon is in front of him. His lightsaber snaps to life, his voice louder still, reminding Ciaràn of what he is fighting against, restoring him to time. "Padawan, relax."

Ciaràn felt he must be nearer to his true name now. He activated the stolen lightsaber—pale orange. Qui-Gon just toyed with the idea of fighting him, orange and green fields barely touching. Ciaràn leaned in and struck.

And Qui-Gon's blade shorted through his own, sending a jolt of electricity into Ciaràn's hands. The orange saber winked out. _A training saber!—_In place of a curse Ciaràn threw its hilt onto the floor, seeing for a moment himself dashing it into Qui-Gon's face and breaking his nose, red human blood coating that face—but this is not a desirable outcome—

Qui-Gon looked over the Zabrak's shoulder to the computer, and to the apprentice's surprise, speaks. "He was preparing one to take off. If you wish, find it and go before anyone from the Council arrives."

Taking clear orders was a relief even as Qui-Gon's words stirred up another storm of questions. The Jedi moved to tend the fallen; Ciaràn examined the computer.

With a few clicks the ship that was primed to go was also permitted. A craft fit for five and hyperspace capable, it would fit his purpose well but still take him valuable time starting the engines. Jedi were massing.

But Qui-Gon looked up from Rali's unconscious form (the dockworker was awake, sitting slumped next to one of the ships he had failed to protect—Qui-Gon's hand was on his shoulder), staring, still. Giving him a choice. The lightsaber buzz droned outside the door.

Ciaràn sprinted for the ship.

Lights glowed on the console. The silver walls exuded the sharp tang of the engine. Ciaràn set relaxed hands to the controls and lost himself in familiarization and final preparations. He kept most of the prearranged flight plan.

The ship lifted off and angled upward, slipping out of the shadows of the hanger. Ciaràn stepped back from the controls, breathing in what he had done, as Coruscant fell away.

_What now? Whatnowwhatnownownow—_

His name fell away from him then. The Force rushed in the breach where the words had been, filling him with awareness of the Jedi Temple below. The concentration of the Force pulled him like a gravity well—he rushed to the ship's hold, dark and filled with supply crates. No light was needed to know that this was the part of the ship farthest down, closer to the nexus. He beat his fists against the walls, wanting to go back and take his _revenge--_ Why had he sabotaged himself? Must go back, fight the Jedi with all the power with which he was rocketing away now—

He sunk down, tired. Named in namelessness.


	11. Chapter 11

XI

"The barriers have been broken," Qui-Gon said. He looked around at the Council chamber, his hands folded in his sleeves. One hundred times he had stood here, enough that if felt as if the center were marked with tape, and, as an actor, he stood there on his cue---but this time, tension whitened his hands. What had he released? He needed to go and protect the crowds on Coruscant from the composite Ciaràn had become.

He wasn't sure whether it was a good thing or not that Quinlan Vos thought the same. The Kiffar stood near the door of the chamber, muscled arms folded over his chest.

"Have important data about the Sith we do," Yoda said, "but determine the state of Ciaràn we must."

_Determine what to do with him_, Qui-Gon thought he meant. _Determine whether it is my voice or Quinlan's lightsaber that is the weapon in our right hand._

"Track the ship we can."

Quinlan spoke up. "Masters. Why don't we use the Sith's ship against him?"

"That ship is redolent with the dark side," Saesee Tiin said. "I would beware it."

"It is the fastest ship we have, "said Adi Gallia, "and the stealth capability could keep this whole mission quiet." She didn't say _hidden from the Republic_, but Qui-Gon knew she was thinking it. This was not to get out; it would make the Jedi appear too weak. It would tell the mere mortals that their gods had made a mistake…

"What say you, Qui-Gon? Master Tiin? Helpful will it be, more than hurtful?"

The Council conferred. The Force linked them all like ley-lines, invisible and silent to an outside observer.

The Force flowed through each Council member's mind like a river picking up silt, carrying each of their thoughts and ideas on to the next. This time, they let Qui-Gon and Quinlan into the meld. It was less a voting process than a debate compressed into seconds, the reverse of what Jedi did so that they could slow down time during battle. They gave both the galaxy and individuals consideration, touching the life lines of every Corsucanti for blocks around the Temple.

The Force sighed, drained out through them, and Qui-Gon felt with all the rest of the Council that Masters Windu and Yoda thought the destinies of himself and Ciaràn were linked—and also connected to the Infiltrator.

The world was left refreshed and clear. Qui-Gon said, "We will find him."

Quinlan remained silent as he walked out beside Qui-Gon.

The human packed his things for a month-long journey. He couldn't help looking over his shoulder at the door, ajar, to Ciaràn's dormitory. The window cast a brightened square of orange on the wall.

Qui-Gon hooked his lightsaber to his belt, wondering whether he would have to use it. Ciaràn had _not _ran off because of innate evil within him. If he had been completely consumed by the dark side, Qui-Gon was sure, he would have stayed in the temple to wreak as much havoc as he could. Instead, he had been confused and felt betrayed, and rightly so.

But to react so strongly as to attack the deck master and Padawan Ookett…

Qui-Gon picked up his bag from the mussed bed-sheets and headed out, determined to bring his Padawan back.

**The Zabrak woke **up,stretched out across one of the rows of seats on the hijacked ship. This simple craft had once been used for ferrying Jedi Watchmen and younglings to the Temple. It contained controls configured for one, a central area with rows of seats that could be converted into sleep couches, and an alcove with access to the rear engine nacelles for repairs. No doors separated one part of the ship from another. It had emergency rations enough for a month stowed away in a hatch near the back, canteens of water and small, tasteless protein bars packed with energy. The navicomp had told him it had come from Alderaan, and so the simplest thing to do was to calculate the way back. He knew little about that world in either of his lives, not that he could remember—it mustn't have been important militarily. But getting to it was the simplest thing to do, and what he needed now more than anything was simplicity.

A tension only fully realized after he was awake: he didn't know his name.

It wasn't important alone. He didn't, and didn't think any being did, think of himself by name regularly. That honor was given to a selfish, singular _I_. But more important than any collection of letters, he didn't know _who _he was.

Jedi or Sith, young or old, known or historyless…

He sat up, yawned, made his slow way over to the short flight of steps down to the captain's niche. He looked out at the sweeping tunnel of hyperspace. In reality his ship could be traveling in any direction—down, up, diagonally. Direction was relative, and there was nothing to be relative _to _in hyperspace. But to him it appeared to be an arrow pointing forward, a road he could walk on. A line toward his destination.

He watched his own hands lean against the control board. He was still wearing the tan Jedi robes, and could foresee no chance to change in the near future. Whoever he was, he had no desire to go for weeks without a shower—one thing the little ship didn't have, at least not that he'd found so far.

For a moment he powerfully wanted to go back to his room in the Jedi Temple.

Was Rali alright? He remembered the two bodies he had thrown against the hanger floor.

He remembered Qui-Gon saying _we all choose to act like sentients, or like animals. _But the Jedi had not even given him a chance to remember his Sith life. The memories were hazy, and he could not be sure which came from dreams—looking out over the Temple and _hating_, walking the hallways of the Works. Likewise, his memories of his life before his capture—his training under Yoda, his classes before the one in which he had met Rali—had faded, leaving him certain that the Jedi had lied to him until Qui-Gon had chosen to tell the real story. Leaving him without a history.

And without enough filling up his thoughts he needed an outlet for the frustration that washed over him, needed to curl his fists and _hit _something—

But the ship must remain undamaged.

He sank to his knees at the top of the stairs, trying to meditate, trying to let his memories percolate and appear naturally, when all he wanted was to be able to hook them on a line and drag them flashing and flailing out.

**Jedi Master Saesee **Tiin had investigated the Sith starship and, after a harrowing process of ferreting out traps, made it safe for use, but still Qui-Gon hesitated on the ramp before stepping into the shadow of the craft. In front of him, Quinlan looked tensely around at the large equipment bay the ramp lead into. Master Tiin had prepared them for what they would sense here, but…the dark side had sank into this ship, had been installed in it with each one of its parts. Perhaps it had been crafted by Republic Sienar Systems, but its workings had been consecrated by Darth Sidious. Qui-Gon sensed the darkness on him as a pressure that made his breaths shallow and the shadows deep, the red low-power lighting—not unusual for a ship not using its complete life support system because it was still in dock—sinister and disheartening.

But he also felt that these impressions would leave him if he just stepped away from the Temple and let the ship take him. That it would show him sights he had never seen throughout the galaxy, bring him to life-forms stranger and more beautiful than he had ever imagined and let him truly know them, without the burden of the formal title _Jedi_. To the ship, the Force was something more natural than life itself.

And it wanted him to explore that fully. It was a teacher in its own right, a surrogate parent for its pilot, and also a child that needed, _wanted_, to be guided.

Qui-Gon remembered who had guided it before him and strode up the ramp, determined to ignore its advances.

Behind him, Yoda, Mace Windu, and Kit Fisto watched him go with a grave, silent air. Padawan Ookett stood slightly behind them, his elbow wrapped in gauze.

They turned and left as the ship began to power up.

**In the cockpit**, Quinlan had taken the controls. These were reassuringly familiar to Qui-Gon, simple and standard—except with regards to the sections of the computer dedicated to the stealth field generator, a technology he had never come across before. As Quinlan slowly moved the ship through official lanes toward the streams of traffic escaping Coruscant's atmosphere, Qui-Gon used the holoprojector in the room behind the pilot's station to pull up a map of the ship. It had two levels in its spherical crew compartment, with the wings and nose entirely taken up by machinery. On the lower level, the sphere was ringed with almost identical-sized rooms; a few storage rooms, a few bunks, a 'fresher and medical station, a few rooms optimistically labeled "detention and interrogation". The upper room looked like a mockery of the Jedi Council chamber and had perhaps been used for business meetings when the ship was a courier; in the middle of the ring of seats, the holoprojector was designed to be able to be retracted into the floor.

The place would have looked normal—albeit as normal as any assassin's mobile fortress—if it weren't for what the Force did to it. In the same way that looking at a sunny day could be cheery if you were happy, or blinding and obtrusive if you were upset, the dark side deepened the shadows and roughened the corrugated floor. It was a weight on his shoulders…

But then, Qui-Gon thought about grief, all the shades and shapes of it, grief that made the days harsh. And that had been a weight. But _this…_

It was more like a _push_. A desire to _move_, to push forward into hyperspace and explore. A thirst for the knowledge gained from subjugating a culture, from dissecting it down to the atoms. It was the fascination of a scientist pushing a glass slide down onto a living specimen.

And watching something die was the only way to tell how it lived…

"Quinlan," Qui-Gon said, raising his head from where he hadn't realized his chin had tipped onto his chest as if in mediation or prayer. "What do you sense?"

The other Jedi's dreadlocked head turned slightly, but he did not adjust his attentive position at the controls. "The dark side is strong here. It takes parts of our minds and…it enjoys us watching it." He shook his head. "There's power here—strength, motivation. Arrogance."

"Yes." A scientist that thought it was more complex than its subjects.

"Focus on the mission, Master Jinn. See if the holoproj or the navicomp contain any files we can use."

Wary that if he stayed too long in one place he might just start meditating, Qui-Gon checked the navicomp first. The ship's former routes, transponder codes, even the registry data and history had been erased, triggered somehow by its capture. The ship might as well have been brand new.

He returned to the holoproj and bent next to it, triggering the previously played messages and contact list. All had been erased, factory standard—except one. A message without a name attached.

"Quinlan. Look at this."

The Kiffar turned and came to stand next to Qui-Gon as he played the message.

A life-sized, hooded figure rose up. Qui-Gon stood to meet its eyes.

The Sith Lord's voice cracked and spat. "Destroy them. The galaxy waits…we work and wait." But then the crackling voice dissolved into static. For a few long moments, the Jedi waited. The figure was not of a good enough resolution—undoubtedly another result of the ship's attempt to destroy all evidence of its previous owner—for Qui-Gon to learn anything about the speaker from the grey-tan, pixilated mess of a face. But words formed again. "…then return to me, Lord Maul."

"It's a trap," Quinlan said.

"Of course it's a trap." Qui-Gon replied. 'He left this for us. But it tells us one thing—"

"One thing we knew before. The Sith we caught is the apprentice."

"No. It tells us that apprentice's name."

**The comm buzz **scared the Zabrak out of his reverie. Staring into the hyperspace pit, he thought he might almost have succumbed to space madness. But then the buzz went off and he started, pulling in a sharp gasp of breath.

No one should be calling this ship…except the Jedi who knew he had stolen it.

After a moment of whole-heartedly not wanting anything to do with them, he flicked the comm on, out of curiosity. He sat there breathing through his mouth, not intending to say anything to even give them the impression that they'd called the right ship.

But the voice was Qui-Gon's, familiar as the Jedi Code. "We know you're there. You don't need to speak. We've pieced together some of the puzzle, and it could help you to be a part of it. Meet us on peaceful ground and we can discuss this. We have your ship—the Sith's ship."

Silence, then, "Ciaràn. Ciaràn…"

"Darth Maul."

Perhaps they heard his movement; he sat back and blinked, struck to the marrow by the memory—not esoteric knowledge, not a hint of the Force, but _memory_—of his name.

He remembered it all now. Sith training, Sith Code, Darth Sidious—the name, the face, the Force sense. The _hatred. _The Jedi were _vermin—_

And yet both memories existed, two lives crowding him. He could draw parallels between them—the toy chain shattering in Yoda's hands alongside Sidious giving him the first weapon he could remember, a solid wood stick—the Room of One Thousand Fountains alongside the steamy jungle of Dorvalla—

The mission to Tatooine, to retrieve the child queen and the Force-bright boy.

But there the memories ended. The only blur that remained was right between his lives. He didn't remember the Jedi capturing him, or Qui-Gon's part in it all—and so hated them all the more for imagined cruelties.

He would have his revenge. He was _Darth Maul!  
_And yet, a part of him just as strong, wanted to talk to Qui-Gon as Ciaràn.


	12. Chapter 12

XII

Alderaan was an old planet. Its mountains had been worn down by time and snow to gradual, gentle slopes and grassy plateaus. Blue lakes sat serene in their bowls. But it was not a tame planet; the rudimentary computer told Darth Maul; it had sat so long and fought and learned among itself until it had one of the most diverse and complex ecosystems in the galaxy. Some creatures were so specified to a niche that to take them out of their latitude would kill them, and others could survive at extreme conditions unheard of on Alderaan. The computer contained basic data on planets the ship might visit, presumably to familiarize the Jedi pilot with them, but did not connect to the larger HoloNet, and so was useless in finding the other thing that Maul so strongly wanted to know—the origin of his name.

Perhaps he had family somewhere, perhaps his name held some code that would unlock for him what direction to go in; perhaps Darth Sidious, as all-knowing as he was, had made a code of it that would tell him where to go next.

_Why not go right back to Sidious?_

Because although he remembered how the Dark Lord had his hands in everything, in all the workings of galactic politics, Maul also felt that the one thing Sidious did not understand was his Ciaràn-personality. Because Sidious had not created it; but then nor had the Jedi, not in the process of refining and erasing that had produced Maul.

As soon as he passed through Alderaan's orbit, an automated voice asked for his destination, addressing him as Master Jedi—the Watchman must have gone in and out often, which was, Maul supposed, part of their just description. The voice demanded to know his destination, and livid with the irony of the address Maul scanned a map of Alderaan for a mid-sized village, trusting in the Force—and not really caring—that e would get where he wanted. A town called Danoda, on the edge of a mountain range, was the right size, and so he named it.

Listening carefully to the computer droning on about weapons restrictions and some activities being illegal, he took the ship down.

**"We've run into **a problem," Quinlan said as Qui-Gon sat down in the _Scimitar'_s second level for the descent to Alderaan. White clouds were beginning to dissolve before the viewport as the ship skimmed Alderaan's atmosphere.

"What is it?"

"No weapons allowed on the planet. This ship is full of them."

"Ask to set down in the capital, Aldera, under guard. Senator Antilles should accept a message from the Jedi."

Quinlan nodded. When Alderaan hailed them, he explained that the Jedi had capture the ship and were chasing a fugitive. Soon sleek aircars armed with electronics-crippling ion cannons roared out of the atmosphere and slaved the _Scimitar _between them to guide it in. The voice of one of the security officers came over the comm again.

"Master Jedi. Welcome. Please note that your lightsabers must be released to the palace guard along with any other weapons. A message just came in that one of your number has arrived in Danoda; Master Ellis, I believe."

Quinlan looked back at Qui-Gon.

"The Watchman for Alderaan." Qui-Gon said. "It was his ship that Ciaràn took."

"Then that's where we need to go next."

**The palace of **the royal family of Alderaan shared its grandiose scale with the palace on Naboo, but was much more modern. The Jedi docked outside the city on a pad overlooking the caldera lake and were immediately surrounded by guardsmen, who locked up their lightsabers and molded a pressor field over the ship. It lurked warily, like a wild animal.

One blue-clad guard confronted the Jedi in the hangar. "Master Jedi, with all due respect, this ship shouldn't be here. It'll have to be confiscated until you leave the planet."

Qui-Gon and Quinlan exchanged glances. Qui-Gon said, "We would like to speak to Senator Antilles."

They met on a round deck above the lake. Aldera had been the site of a volcano once, before the ground relaxed and rain filled the ancient stone bowl. Then humans had rained down as well, and built a city.

Bail Antilles, dark-haired and round-faced, looked thoroughly Coruscanti in his woven blue robes. Two guards and a secretary attended him, placed strategically almost out of earshot beside sculptured, potted bushes. The Jedi bowed before him.

"Welcome," he said. "I've been told you're chasing someone, and I'll have only one caveat to delay you." _Definitely not Coruscanti_, Qui-Gon thought, relieved. _Too straightforward. _"One of my advisors will go with you to ensure that you find your way around properly." He gestured the person Qui-Gon had assumed was a secretary forward.

She was a thin, blue-grey skinned alien with amphibian-slick skin and a limp frill around her neck, and she held a datapad in her thin arms as if it weighed more than she liked. She said, "Good day, Master Jedi"

Bail said, "This is Alyce. She can travel for a few days with you, help out..and help be sure that the citizens of the planet aren't exposed to your fugitive."

_Keep tabs on us, _Qui-Gon knew he meant, and Bail's pleading expression showed that he knew it too. But if that was how it had to be…Alyce looked barely twenty years old. Qui-Gon said, "Senator, we may end up in danger. Having weapons would make it easier for us to defend her if need be."

Qui-Gon felt her nervousness in the Force, but Alyce gave no impression of wanting to speak. Bail continued, "Don't misunderstand this culture, Master Jedi—I know you are not familiar with our customs. We do not restrict our people's expression. We do not forbid someone who wants to live elsewhere from coming back to see their family. Many beings from different parts of the galaxy travel here because they want the kind of life we provide; a quiet one. We do not ignore how the rest of the galaxy lives; this is why we have a senatorial committee. But we offer a choice, and there are citizens relying on me to provide them that choice.

"That said, I do not imagine that the Jedi Council sent you here for a typical fugitive. You will have my comm number, and if you call, the Alderaan guard will be down to aid you with ion cannons and stun guns at their disposal."

Qui-Gon bowed; Quinlan also, a bit more ruefully.

**Darth Maul arrived **in the town in the mountains during planetary evening, when a bored traffic controller ushered him into a landing pit in a field and addressed him by the Jedi Master's name. He walked out to the town tentatively, missing the mission data Sidious usually provided him. It would tell him what the town was like and where to go, how to blend in.

Houses and speeder parks were black since the sun had gone down, but a yellow light-glow and Force presences remained on a street of two- and three-story stores in the town center. Gentle, cool wind rustled the decorative grasses. Maul was used to working-class towns and fighting pits, or Coruscant's lower levels, where a being with an inked face and black cloak could blend in by virtue of people being afraid to cross him. But this was more like the upper levels, where informal dress was the crime most likely to be noticed by passerby. Maul judged his own costume; tan, loose Jedi clothing cinched with a black belt and tabards. He snugged his collar around his neck and pulled his wide sleeves down over his marked hands.

A quiet murmur of voices saturated the cobbled sidewalk between the shops. Maul kept his head down, but in the space of a few moments he saw a purple-haired Zabrak; a father with his child on his shoulders politely asking a Kushiban whether the space on the bench beside it was taken; and a handful of other species dressed in what looked like whatever sort of clothing fit their fancy.

This was more like the Jedi Temple than any town Maul had ever been in, and so he relaxed into the Ciaràn persona and saw how here people who looked different were seen as innocent until proved guilty. The Force flowed peacefully.

So he walked, looking for a place with public HoloNet access.

He found a library, a columned building at the end of a busy, well-lit street. No one questioned whether he was a local or not—either because they were native and stupid because most people on Alderaan were trustworthy, or because they were simply wealthy enough to have a system open to anyone.

Among the shelves of carefully ordered disks, across from teenage humans giggling about something on their terminal, Darth Maul ran a search function on his own names.

There were Ciaràn Surins everywhere, most Zabraks, some not. He could probably spend a lifetime picking through to look at each of them and their families.

He went back to the search function and typed in _Darth Maul._

There were no exact matches. But 'Darth' pulled up ranks of encyclopedia entries. It was a hereditary title among the Sith, he read, given to those who had proven themselves worthy of the title 'Lord'. Skimming the article, he found that it was not like Jedi Mastery in that a Lord was freed from their tutor—judging by Darth Revan and Darth Malak, the example in the article, 'Darths' stayed with their Masters.

Maul leaned back and looked at the screen as if he could talk to Revan and Malak through it.

He folded his arms, let out a quiet breath. What had _he _done to earn his title? Funny that it wasn't a given name per se, that 'Maul' was not another family.

He tried to remember, tried to part the mists.

_He remembers: Exhausted and rain-soaked he listens to Sidious tell him again that another apprentice has always been waiting in the wings. Betrayal floods him. Sidious raises lightsaber against him and Maul is so optionless, so frustrated, that he attacks Sidious with all the tiny strength he has left and tastes his Master's blood on his tongue._

_ And then, when Maul's desperation rules him, he is given his name._

_ Maul did not understand, tried to forget the event while treasuring the name; but now he saw that the reason Sith never formally left their Masters was because they always turned on each other. _

He closed the search and left.

The fields were dark and dewy. Piled shapes in the distance were nerfs, big, shaggy meat beasts lowing in their sleep. He picked his way through the field back to the ship.

He lay sleepless on his bench-bed that night, first replaying his successes in his head. The defeat of Silus, of the Jedi in whose blood he had first washed the double lightsaber.

(They had taken it from him, the Jedi had. He would wrest it back, he would _destroy_ them--)

But Qui-Gon had given him something else. _Rali_ had given him something else, a sense of company and family.

But he was _stronger _than them. He could dance around them all, if they hadn't kept him doing _break-falls—_

He needed to start a new life somehow.

He didn't _need _a new life—Sidious was still out there.

Sidious had let him go, had sent bounty hunters after him—

This inner debate wouldn't get him anywhere. He stood up and stretched, then paced through katas. He slammed punches into seat backs, went through pushups of four variants, fed to his wearying muscles an organized rage that widened his eyes and pulled his lips back from his teeth—

He thought at first that each target was Qui-Gon's face, but then it was Sidious'.

But, he realized, this would not help either. Not thinking at all was as bad as too much thinking.

He stopped. He couldn't betray Sidious…but that conviction was based on a _very _sheltered life.

The sky brightened as he looked out at the it, one hand on the pilot's seat shivering with exertion.

He needed to talk to Qui-Gon, to ask him whether the Jedi would _explain _him.

And he realized he had chosen a side.


	13. Chapter 13

_Author's Note: _Ohkriff do I realize I haven't updated in forever. The reason should be pretty obvious--new fandom, as much as I hate to be "one of those people". But look, update! And I'm writing the next chapter as we speak. _This will be finished. _I'm really sorry that it's taken so long.

* * *

**XIII**

Alyce reminded Qui-Gon of Anakin Skywalker in how she held a semi-mythical view of the Jedi, except that her reaction was to be silent and sit in the ship, blind to its Force aura which had, while Qui-Gon was gone, shaded from titillated to morose. They flew through a misty morning, heading for Danoda.

Then she piped up. "Why don't you find him with the Force, master Jedi?"

Qui-Gon looked across a few seats at her. Quinlan was piloting silently. "And how do you think we would do that?"

Her blue face fell—she had been expecting a magic show instead of a quiz. Qui-Gon was tired of myths about Jedi, myths that did not have Tahl dead and Obi-Wan dead in them.

He said, "We know where he is."

"How? Did you meditate?"

"The Force does not need to be called. It is always there."

"Ooh…."

"You will need to stay out of the way when we find him. He could be dangerous."

"You mustn't disrupt any Alderaani citizens during the arrest."

"We will try. I can't guarantee what our quarry will do."

"I don't mean that you need to protect our naïve citizens from learning the horrors of war. We live in the real galaxy. But you're _Jedi. _You don't use blasters anyway." Her voice had merged away from belligerent to an offended sort of awe. "I thought you would be fine with fighting without weapons."

"We will," Quinlan grumbled. Qui-Gon hadn't expected him to speak and waited for more, but the Kiffar didn't even turn around.

His sullen mood touched the rest of the short voyage.

**Darth Maul sensed **them coming. He stood in the door of the ship, feeling his cloak whip. If not for his thick Jedi boots he might have felt its edges on his ankles. Qui-Gon's presence tasted like familiarity and pain. Quinlan was easier to purely hate because he did not know him as well. There was another presence with them too, dim as one blind to the Force, and that one was forgettable. Disposable.

The Jedi had talked of a peaceful meeting, and so Maul would give them that to start (even though he had such a nice vantage point here, if only they didn't have a ship.)

Said ship arced overhead before landing far enough away that it couldn't shoot at his. The _Scimitar _had its own presence, one that seemed to shiver at his touch like a horse pushing its flank against its master's hand.

He would meet them armed and waiting to see what they would do—whether Qui-Gon's quiet or Quinlan's brutality would rule the Jedi on this day.

The wind waved the grass as the _Scimitar _settled between two hills in the distance, and Darth Maul waited as three figures grew larger against the horizon. Three? The third presence was the one that was frail as scrap paper, excess weight, barely there enough to matter. Why had it come?

Qui-Gon moved close enough to attack. Maul looked at him as if through two different people's eyes; one saw him as kind and reliable, and one saw him named only as _target._

"Ciaràn," Qui-Gon said softly.

Quinlan spoke when Maul didn't reply fast enough. "We've chased you long enough."

Maul forgot speaking and let his expression show his anger.

"It wasn't a chase," Qui-Gon made sure to clarify. "It's a rescue."

How _arrogant_--! Maul pointed at Quinlan. The alien girl flinched, but the Jedi could sense that it wasn't an attack. "I will not negotiate in his presence."

"Belligerent still," Quinlan growled.

"Because your people made me so!" Now he did surge forward, and Quinlan wrenched his saber hilt from his belt.

To everyone's surprise it was the Alderaani girl who stepped into his path. Maul found himself faced with a datapad. He backhanded it and turned to Quinlan, reaching for his own lightsaber.

Qui-Gon almost kept his voice level. "Ciaràn."

_Do you think the name is a magic spell? Do you think it will flip a switch in me? _

"_My people_ made the decision to let you live, Sith," Quinlan said, crouched like he was ready to fight. "I would have made a different choice."

"Stop it!" the girl said. "You can't fight here."

Maul didn't know who she was or why she was here, but she shouldn't have spoken. Maul took the Force by the throat and lifted her two meters into the air. Her legs kicked and she cried out but held the datapad tight, trying not to scream as breath piled up in her throat like stopped traffic, letting out bleats.

"Ciaràn." Once more, Qui-Gon spoke the name like an invocation. Was it supposed to work into Maul like a drug? He remembered being Ciaràn. It was because of that memory that he hated now.

Hated Quinlan. His emotion for Qui-Gon was more complicated than that.

Quinlan charged forward and Maul threw him too. The Kiffar's back hit the ground three meters away at the crest of a hill. When he stood, one boot-heel slipped in the grass toward the steep slope.

Maul dropped the girl. Quinlan rushed to catch her, slipped once again. She hit the ground, rolled once, and caught herself on the slope, the datapad held in front of her like a shield. Quinlan's spring-green lightsaber snapped to life.

In a burst of Force awareness Maul realized that Qui-Gon was taking advantage of his watching the tableaux. The older Jedi attacked too. It was a messy charge with his lightsaber tip back over his right shoulder and stating to arc around.

Maul did not want to wield his own lightsaber. He sensed like a prophesied future that he wouldn't be able to stop if he started fighting like this. With a sword in his hand he would be Maul forever, and Ciaràn would never get a chance to show which was stronger.

He leaped backwards, onto the top of the ship and then off it so that for a moment everyone in front of him was obscured by the silver wall of its sides. But Qui-Gon circled around quickly, cloak flaring behind him with the cowl lapping at his cheeks and jaw. Maul kept retreating, trying to stare his opponent down—

"Quinlan was right about one thing," Qui-Gon said clearly, and his words made Maul blink. "It was the Council who decided to let you live. I might have said otherwise at the time, if it was up to me."

This was not the Master Ciaràn knew. "Why?"

Qui-Gon looked old, his once-bright hair graying. "I wanted my small vengeance on you, Ciaràn. And if I had taken it I might have slowly graduated to a larger vengeance, and you might not have survived the trip. I refrained, and I try to teach you the lesson of refrain now when I had months to teach it before. We have minutes; I do not know what Quinlan will do for sure."

He was hurting; Maul could sense it like a predator could smell the blood in the wound of an animal. "Vengeance, Master? Tell me for what."

Qui-Gon stared at him, the glow of his lightsaber not touching his face in the bright sunlight. "For killing my apprentice."

"Wh…what?"

Qui-Gon started to circle. Maul refused to be backed up against the ship and started angling down a slope toward the open plain, conceding the high ground. "Obi-Wan," Qui-Gon said. "Tell me you remember his name."

Maul thought. It was the Force sense he remembered when he dug back in his memory for something labeled _Qui-Gon's Padawan_; a bright, complex presence like a pastel landscape compared to the glaring sun that was Quinlan. He told the truth. "I don't remember his name. But I remember him, now." He almost said _Master_, but it was Maul who remembered.

Qui-Gon said softly, "You took him away."

And Maul remembered. Hot stinging sand of Tatooine whipped against his skin as the Padawan fell onto his blade and became just one more body, just one more pale face unsuited to the fight now or ever before—

And Ciaràn saw that that face could have belonged to a boy sitting next to him in classes at the Temple, could have laughed with him and fought beside him, could have filled the gap at his side that Rali tried to fill—

His breath caught. Maul had forgotten how to control it for a moment and Ciaràn had greater concerns, greater sadness wracking him. Guilt, like the bile of sickness piling up in his stomach, filled him. Qui-Gon had trained him for—how long had it really been? Months, but it must have felt like years to Qui-Gon too, because he had looked into his new Padawan's eyes and seen his old one dying. The Council had made him do this. Ciaràn felt anger at them until he wondered what he would have done in their place, whether he would have spared….himself.

"Master, I…"

The Force snapped like a wire. Ciaràn looked up, his lips stretching back from his teeth into Maul's grimace as he sensed Quinlan fling himself off the top of the ship. The Kiffar slammed into Ciaràn. His fingers tightened around Quinlan's tabards as they rolled, the ground smacking against Ciaràn's back and shoulders. He felt the hill steepen and pushed Quinlan away with all his strength, forcing himself into an out-of-control tumble down a hill. At the bottom he lay as dizzy as he had ever been, the world seeming to tilt and blur around him. Quinlan was coming.

Ciaràn struggled to his feet, but couldn't quite make it. The Kiffar's lightsaber lent green to the blur, seeming to spin like a carousel. But then another color joined the mix; Qui-Gon's blade, meeting the other Jedi's over Ciaràn's head.


	14. Chapter 14

**XIV. **

"What are you thinking?" Quinlan growled to Qui-Gon. Ciaràn swung his feet out from under the crossed blades and stood, still dizzy but with the world evening out around him. He felt strained sinews that would only get worse tomorrow. Pity how hurt one could get simply from the ground. This was the last place and time where he wanted to be wasting energy.

"I'm serving justice," Quinlan growled. "Serving the Republic."

Qui-Gon was as calm as if he were sitting in the Temple. Ciaràn thought that maybe the old Jedi was only ever as calm as when somebody held a saber to his throat. "This justice is starting to look a lot like revenge. Do not erase what I have worked for here, my friend. Ciaràn, tell him who you are."

"I'm Ciaràn," slipped out quietly, and then the words came faster and louder like an avalance gaining momentum. "I killed Obi-Wan. I slaughtered him." He felt his brow pulling down into tight furrows, his lips pulling up from his teeth at the memory of the final blow. "I enjoyed it, wanted the taste and the small of his death—"

Quinlan had been preparing, sinking into his center of mass, and at that last word he forgot Qui-Gon entirely. He leapt for Ciaràn.

His lightsaber had to swing wide out of its earlier alignment to get anywhere the Zabrak, so before it could Ciaràn turned into the attack and hit Quinlan just below the elbow. Another strike with his open palm and the saber dropped out of Quinlan's hand to the ground, the green blade retracting. Quinlan kept moving. He struck at Ciaràn's neck with the hand that wasn't numb.

Ciaràn met his hand with his elbow and pulled Quinlan over his shoulder. He couldn't remember whether Sidious or Drallig had taught him this throw. The Kiffar's back hit the ground with an abrupt tamping sound, ending the momentum begun at his saber strike. Without bothering to gesture Quinlan called his lightsaber to him with the Force, but Ciaràn was already on him. It felt effortless to drop, driving a knee into Quinlan's sternum in the process, and clamp down on the Kiffar's wrists. Ciaràn felt his foe's fingers clench in his grasp as Quinlan tried to reach for his lightsaber.

It was hard to speak instead of just squeeze, pushing the spidery fingers scratching at his palm down into the dirt and to their breaking point. Maul would not have thought beyond that. Ciaràn focused on Quinlan's face.

He said, "I enjoyed killing him. I'd enjoy killing _you_—"

Quinlan got a knee up and pushed at Ciaràn. The Zabrak pressured down on his wrists but Quinlan surged and grabbed a fistful of the tunic over his shoulder; they flipped. Ciaràn felt his teeth snap together as his back hit the ground. Their momentum kept going as they headed for the edge of a hill, and Ciaràn slammed an elbow partially against the ground and partially against Quinlan's shoulder. He pinned the Jedi again.

"Let me _finish_," Ciaràn snarled. "I enjoyed that death and Qui-Gon had to live with that, had to look at me every day and remember it. I owe him for that. I've learned from that. From everything else in the Jedi Code, rules, books too—but it's still all wrapped up in one lesson."

He rolled aside to let Quinlan get up.

The Kiffar lay flat for a moment, face set in a glower, before standing and picking up his saber hilt. He stared from Ciaràn to Qui-Gon.

"Go back to the Council," Qui-Gon said evenly. "Leave Alyce with the ambassador on the way. Tell Yoda what happened here." He spoke again after meeting two uncertain stares. "Ciaràn and I will stay here. We have much to discuss."

"Are you really going to let this happen?" Quinlan growled. "Obi-Wan was your apprentice. You're acting like he was a stranger."

"No…the reason I can do this is _because_ of how I knew him. Obi-Wan was no ideal of justice. He was a boy. I like to think he would have wanted a life to be saved instead of taken."

The two Jedi looked at one another evenly. Three heads turned as they heard footsteps and a panting Alyce charged up the hill. She stopped between Ciaràn and Quinlan as if deciding which to hit in the knees. "N-no fighting!"

Ciaràn saw Qui-Gon try to resist a smile and didn't know whether his lips were curling with disdain or the same mirth. A quick chuckle replaced all the stale air of the fight. Alyce's neck ruff flared.

"Come on," Quinlan growled. "I'm dropping you back in the capital."

"What about the fugitive?" the girl asked.

Ciaràn felt his hackles rise, but there was no reason for him to act on the anger. Maul would have always found attack simplest. Ciaràn….did not want to see Qui-Gon and Quinlan fight because of him. He could sense his past training beating at him like a bird, but it was just that—a past, a fragile feathered thing he could toss out into the sky and watch it dwindle as it flew away. He didn't have two personalities, or a monster under his bed.

Yes, the Council had forced Ciaràn on Maul at first, but since then he had chosen for himself. Darth Sidious' commands in his head still seemed as loud as when he'd been called in their direction after he fought the bounty hunters. He was not sure what it would be like to face the Sith Lord. Maybe that was why Qui-Gon wanted them to stay on Alderaan—so that that confrontation never happened.

But the Council had manipulated him, so he didn't feel too keen on going back to them either. Qui-Gon, though, had hidden his pain even as he trained the man who killed his protégé. That was power that Ciaràn could admire and Maul could covet without understanding.

Ciaràn knew that his struggle with himself was not over, but Alderaan was a good place to have it.

He looked into Quinlan's eyes, forcing his own features to smooth into a relaxed expression. He knew that his face looked like—still was—a Sith mask to Jedi eyes. That could not be changed now. Perhaps new lessons could be learned in those branching patterns. "Forgive the trouble I've caused," Ciaràn said. He couldn't resist adding, "As I can forgive the Jedi's actions."

Quinlan simply nodded, his dreadlocked hair shifting around his grass-stained shoulders. "Let's go, Alyce."

"Take the ship Ciaràn brought here," Qui-Gon said. "It belongs to the Temple. It would be best if the Scimitar remained here."

Alyce said what Ciaràn imagined everyone was thinking. "But you said that ship belonged to the dark side. It's heavily armed!" Well, he hadn't thought that last part.

Quinlan was resolute. "We're not leaving a weapon on in your hands."

Qui-Gon said softly, "You're letting the dark side turn you into one."

"No. I know where the line is drawn." Quinlan paced forward, called his lightsaber to his hand with enough bitter force that Ciaràn heard the smack of it against his wrapped palm.

"It's not that simple, young one. We're beyond sides here."

_Young one_, Ciaràn noted. _Which one of us does he mean? _

"You've stepped over," Quinlan said. "You've forgotten our teachings from concentrating so hard on your role as master. That ship will just pull you further down. Come with me, Master Qui-Gon." Quinlan activated his lightsaber. "Or I'll begin to think you've stepped too far."

Qui-Gon shook his head, looking down sadly, but when he raised his blue eyes they were shards. "No, Quinlan. We're not going anywhere."

Quinlan's saber tip dipped. Ciaràn activated the orange lightsaber he'd stolen from a Jedi so long ago. Its hilt felt short, and hidden compared to the double-bladed lightsaber Maul had known. Light in his hands it felt unwieldy and useless.

Quinlan charged toward Qui-Gon.


	15. Chapter 15

XV.

Qui-Gon's green blade snapped to life as Quinlan rushed him. At the last minute, the Kiffar swung back, his arm straightening out to a bar that doubled the reach of his blade. Ciaràn ducked and felt the thrum over his head a hairsbreadth later.

Quinlan drew back, snarling. Qui-Gon looped his lightsaber around to try and come up under his arm. Clearing his reach with a sidestep on legs longer than his, Quinlan put Ciaràn between himself and Qui-Gon.

The Force called for Ciaràn to retreat, but that wasn't the fighting style his muscle memory knew. One butterfly twist around the hilt of his lightsaber took him back to Quinlan's blind side. (The saber was all wrong; there should have been a staff hilt for him to grab onto, but even with his balance off the direction turned out right.) The Jedi's lightsabers clashed.

Another psychic call came, like something Ciaràn was trying to remember, a word lurking on the tip of his tongue.

Qui-Gon called out, "Why are you doing this? Jedi seek redemption!"

Quinlan shook his head like a nek hurt in battle. "I'm doing it for Aayla and Anakin."

"What?"

"For the Padawans." Quinlan shook his head. "You may have an adult student, but there are children in the Temple. Keeping Ciaràn there is like leading Sidious right to them. I won't have it!"

Quinlan swung for Qui-Gon's torso as if he were going to chop a tree down. Ciaràn bounced onto his toes, ready to help his Master—

Only to hear the smack of flesh against leather as Qui-Gon caught Quinlan's arm by the gauntlet and held him there one-handed, staring up at the younger man with an expression bordering on sad. "We will not fight here," Qui-Gon said. To Ciaràn's surprise Quinlan stopped, his shoulders shaking, mesmerized by the words as if they were a mind trick. "I do not believe the splintering of our order will come by your hands. And we will not fight here…because I am better at this than you. "

Ciaràn could sense the tension between them like a map of the Force, with branching paths laid out before him. Qui-Gon was using intimidation, but also more than that. Ciaràn remembered seeing Quinlan spar before, on the padded fighting floor broken into rings of Padawans. (The Council had given him this memory, maybe to explain Jedi combat to him, maybe to urge him to stay away from brash beings like Quinlan.) The Kiffar fought hard, sweat slicking the craggy muscles of his arms. He went faster than the Master wanted, and a quick sidestep landed a strike with a lightsaber hilt to the side of his head.

So what Qui-Gon was saying now meant, _remember that, no matter how much you posture, your anger does you no good. _He is saying, _It's not worth fighting for. _

And, Ciaràn could see in the silver backlight to his smoky blue eyes, he was saying something simpler than that too. He was saying _I have been a Jedi Master longer than you have. I have found reservoirs of power that do not run dry. I know what Jedi means. Part of it is service and safety and humility._

_ And part of it is purely Mastery._

Ciaràn stood loose, feeling like a fifth wheel. Then the thought that had been escaping him clicked in. The ally he'd forgotten—

Over the rolling hills, the _Scimitar _rumbled to life. The Force had known what Ciaràn had been going to do before he did and had prepped some systems, but others needed more time. The sleek black ship powered into view trailing a billow of smoke and a burning electric scent like the miasma of the dark side itself. For a moment its underbelly blocked the sun.

Qui-Gon and Quinlan separated to watch in trepidation as the ship came down.

Ciaràn felt fear slither around between his stomach and his throat, but it was entirely separate from the steely feeling of his arms raised as if to embrace the ship. He remembered how close Maul had been to it, how he didn't even need to think about the controls in his hands to get them to do what he wanted now.

He lowered his hands to gesture as if to bringing the forward lasers online and pulling the trigger.

Two blasts lanced out and dug furrows into the soft ground next to Quinlan.

"Dark side tricks!" Quinlan growled. Alyce dove toward a dip in the ground and took cover. Ciaràn couldn't tell whether Qui-Gon was proud or disturbed, the emotions wavered so in his mind and his eyes.

Ciaràn lowered his hands. The ship crested the hill, unfurling behind him like wings. He immersed himself in the weight behind him, feeling individual gears turning and sparks jumping through circuits.

It was luck, or the Force, that bade him disengage from it the moment he did. Quinlan stood his ground and wrenched the ship aside with the Force. The starboard wing hit the ground and ripped straight through to the habitation pod, scattering the delicate systems Ciaràn was monitoring in his mind. The nose hit next, ploughed into the dirt, and crumpled. Heat washed over Ciaràn. He saw Qui-Gon fling himself aside at the same time Ciaràn himself did, but the Zabrak knew that Qui-Gon's objective was to get Alyce, not just to protect himself. He would tuck, roll, get her out of the way of the growing fire. Flames ate through the grass, and everything in Ciaràn told him to follow in his Master's stead and _protect the civilian_, but Quinlan was coming at him out of the flames.

Ciaràn reversed direction. Free from his power and collapsing under its own, the _Scimitar _had dug into the ground and lay as a dark hulk behind him. Ciaràn dodged behind one of its landing struts to put a wall between himself and Quinlan. The ship's hatch had been cracked open, and Ciaràn stared inside. The dark side breathed out from it like the rancid breath of a rancor. To go into that maw would mean inundation…would mean embracing the dark side—and his past- without falling against it.

Quinlan's green lightsaber bobbed around the edge of the ramp, his shape obscured by the rising smoke.

Ciaràn stepped into the ship.

**The Jedi Council **had been looking for the Sith Lord for months, not knowing what planet he might be on or in what dark corner he might be lurking. Lying in the grass with the smoke searing his nostrils and the girl he'd rescued lifting her thin shoulders under his arm, Qui-Gon found him.

Eyes had been opened somewhere—old, old eyes the color of molten gold. Sidious had felt the _Scimitar _awaken. Qui-Gon pushed himself off the dirt. Alyce coughed and rolled off the shattered remains of her clipboard. When Qui-Gon stood up, his head nearly cleared the thick billows of smoke. He took a deep breath. As if homing, he could feel the Sith's location far across the stars. No telling what world it was, on this sunlit day without a map in his hands, but he could have stood and looked forever, at what to anyone else would've been an innocuous patch of cloud.

Instead, he reached down and helped Alyce up.

"What now?" She whispered. The fire crackled as it spread, and the ship's walls couldn't get much blacker so the flames were as nothing against it.

"Now," Qui-Gon said, "We tell them the Sith Lord is coming."

**The base of **the _Scimitar _ was a round room with only one other avenue of escape besides the door Ciaràn had come in, and that was the turbolift. He backed toward it. Quinlan moved into the ship, still a silhouette. Neither of the personalities within Ciaràn were good at diplomacy, and he thought now that words would not work. Quinlan had his own words to counter them.

Quinlan charged. Ciaràn raised his saber and felt his back hit the wall for a moment as suddenly the Kiffar was inches from him, stabbing forward but hampered by his own proximity. Ciaràn hooked a foot behind his heel.

He felt Quinlan grab at his shoulders, but before they could come to grips he spun the other man around and slammed him into the nearest doorway. Quinlan hit hard. The automated door slid open, letting the Kiffar fall backwards onto the floor. Inside was a miniature medical center; Maul remembered many times in which he had sat on the low bunk—little more than a bench, really—to bind wounds and synth them over.

There were all sorts of things he could use as weapons in here.

Quinlan scissored his legs and trapped Ciaràn's foot, brought him to the ground with a drop so abrupt it rattled his forearms when he landed on them. Ciaràn swung his legs away, but Quinlan was on his feet and whipping the bloodstained blanket off the bench. He was going to try to drop it over Ciaràn's head, to blind and bind him-

Ciaràn grabbed a corner of the blanket as it flew by. He tackled Quinlan full-on, tired of the fight, feeling Sith rage fog up the back of his mind. Fights should be _simple, _should be _direct—_Quinlan thrashed. Ciaràn pushed forward; Quinlan pushed back with greater bulk and height; Ciaràn dropped his center of gravity and levered Quinlan over his shoulder. The Kiffar's back hit the corner of the bench with a dull clunk. Quinlan gasped, and Ciaràn dropped to one knee with the blanket still looped around his forearms. He shook it out as Quinlan lifted himself away from the leg of the bench to stand up, felt enough pain that it splashed like acid in the Force, and slumped back down.

**The best thing **to do was make Sidious think Ciaràn was dead. Right now, Ciaràn's and the _Scimitar_'s presences were so muddled in Qui-Gon's mind that although he could monitor the fight in his head it was as though the ship itself were punishing Quinlan for entering its space. Qui-Gon could tell, though, where to strike to be sure to cripple the ship. The combatants would sense the danger. They would get out.

He raised his hands toward the part of the forward decks that had nearly been crushed into the ground. He reached in with the Force and learned about the ship. He popped seals and opened gaslines. Then, splitting the seams of the walls with a gesture like a conductor starting a grand symphony, he let the fire in.

**Ciaran tied Quinlan's ** hands. He'd had enough talking, enough attempts. Quinlan would not listen to reason, to truth, and so…. Ciaràn would not kill him, even though the Maul part of him was clamoring to know why not. He didn't have an answer it would understand, but nor was Maul a part of him that influenced what he actually did now.

Dazed, Quinlan strained against the knot. It would be easy to break in a moment. Until then, Ciaràn would walk away, showing that he didn't want to kill him. He'd even shows his back as a sign of trust.

_You're giving him too much, _said a rueful part of Ciaràn that might have been Maul and might just have been common sense.

Instead of listening to it, he retracted his lightsaber and started to walk away.

The Force spiked. Danger was coming, hot and quick as a firestorm, and if he didn't move, if he didn't go _now—_

He turned back to Quinlan. The Kiffar's fingers were working at the knot, but his eyes looked unfocused. For a moment Ciaràn wondered whether Quinlan's spine had hit too hard, whether nerves had been killed instead of just the Jedi's pride.

"You're not going to kill me," Quinlan said.

Ciaràn looked down at him. "No. Idiot."

Quinlan shook his bindings loose. "Help me up."

**"They're still in ** there—" Alyce bounded forward. Qui-Gon caught her shoulder and she struggled, but he got an arm around her. Then the first explosion came and both of them staggered backwards, away from the wash of heat. Qui-Gon felt part of the ship die, as if an arm of it had been amputated. Was Ciaràn feeling the same thing? It would be worse for him.

Qui-Gon could not tell whether Ciaràn was alive. Quinlan's Force sense was present but struggling; he could imagine warning lights going on all over the ship, emergency bulkheads slamming down and buckling open again as—

The fire must have found the fuel tanks. The nose of the ship ripped off, jetting across the field on a roiling, roaring column of flame. Air clapped in back around its former place with a bang, and the whole ship shook. He and Alyce retreated down a slope of a hill, where the heat was not so intense but they could no longer see the back of the ship where the combatants would emerge.

Qui-Gon shut his eyes for a moment and started delving into the Force for answers as a floating ember pocked his face.

The thick whine of fire-speeders swarming in from the nearest town, sirens blaring, heralded two figures appearing over the crest of the hill.

Quinlan was bent over and pale and Ciaràn was coughing as they slid down the hill and did not bother to stand up again. Both looked up at Qui-Gon, weary as warriors. The fire-speeders rained suppressant, white and diaphanous as snow, over the wreck.


	16. Chapter 16

**XVI. **

"You don't think it was you sparing his life that changed his mind?" Qui-Gon looked at Ciaràn across the table in front of a café on Alderaan.

The Zabrak folded his hands over one another. "It wasn't just that. I think you got to him about Obi-Wan, too. He realized that you'd really forgiven Darth Maul. And despite all his issues, Quinlan respected you as a Master."

Quinlan had taken the shuttle Ciaràn had used to get to Alderaan and returned to the Temple, dropping off an unharmed but disillusioned Alyce on the way. The Alderaani senator had hesitantly vouched for the fact that whatever the Jedi had been doing to bring the fire brigade down on them, it must have been in the service of the greater good.

(It had been.)

Ciaràn asked Qui-Gon, "What will you do now?" His own future was at stake, too. As a Padawan, he followed his Master's fate.

Qui-Gon looked around at the town. On this sunny day, families roamed the streets of the town, shopping for food and trinkets. The house where Ciaràn and Qui-Gon were renting rooms sat on the side of the hill on the opposite side from the still feebly smoking remains of the _Scimitar._

"It isn't only Coruscant that could use some Jedi help," Qui-Gon said softly. "I will bide here. Is there any question that you will stay with me?"

Qui-Gon's eyes were hard, like on the day he chose Ciaràn as his Padawan (a Council-given memory) or on the day Obi-Wan died (a Maul-given one). It was the expression of a teacher waiting for the result of a test; impassivity becoming its own kind of judgment. Ciaràn remembered the Temple well. The Council, if they took him back at all, would demand that he change his ways quickly, and become who they wanted Ciaràn to be.

This change, he thought as he watched his own striped hands lying still and useless on the tile table, would not be fast, and it would not be on the Council's terms. Even now he was feeling that it was less of a change and more of an integration. The _Scimitar _had gotten a claw into him, but he remembered it not as an instrument of the dark side, but as one of the few things Maul could trust in his life. It almost served as a friend. Its legacy to Ciaràn would be that he remembered what trusting another being felt like.

"Yes," Ciaràn said to his Master. "I will."

**Anakin Skywalker and **Aayla Securaran out onto the landing pad as soon as the passenger ship had settled. The white smoke from its passing billowed off into the distance, between the city canyons. The sunset cast orange light over the ship's white sides. Anakin thought it was beautiful.

Master Ki-Adi's voice followed the young Jedi from the doorway. "Wait until the smoke clears!"

"I'm going to see Master Qui-Gon!" Anakin kept running.

Aayla had gained ground in front of him, holding her headtails tight around her neck. She turned to look at him for a moment. "What are you talking about?"

Anakin ducked his head and ran faster, his tunic tails flapping. His energy, though, came from knowing that she was right. He could sense that there was only one Force presence on the ship, and that was Quinlan.

By the time he disembarked, Ki-Adi had joined them. As soon as Quinlan stepped onto the landing platform Aayla rushed to throw her arms around his waist. His smile was sincere but quiet. He took Aayla's hand, exchanged words with her that he didn't let Anakin hear, and led her back to Ki-Adi.

Quinlan said, "Qui-Gon and the Sith elected to stay on Alderaan."

Anakin looked up at the Jedi Master, not letting the implications of the words set in yet. He may not have been with the Jedi long, but a slave also knew when to put on a sabacc face. "Master Qui-Gon isn't coming back?"

All four of their heads turned at once as they sensed another figure emerging from the Temple. Rali Ookett, the green fronds on his head standing up in stark contrast to his simple brown clothing, trudged across the bridge. His eyes were wide as he sensed the pall that had fallen over Anakin, who knew that Rali had come looking for news about someone other than Qui-Gon, but would receive the exact same answer.

Quinlan's gaze remained directed at Ki-Adi, the highest-ranking member of the group. With his bushy eyebrows raised, Ki-Adi looked as confused as Anakin felt. Quinlan said, "No. Neither Master Jinn nor Padawan… Ciaràn elected to return. They asked that we consider them in self-imposed exile."

Anakin couldn't help rushing forward, stopping when he realized that he had nothing to fight. "He didn't…say anything? He didn't leave me a message? Why are they staying?"

"I'm sorry." Quinlan started walking toward the Temple, but Anakin stopped. "Why?"

"Redemption," Quinlan said. "It just wouldn't have worked out here."

Ki-Adi shook his head. The two Masters started toward the Temple, surely toward the steely gaze of the Council, and Aayla trailed along behind them. Anakin and Rali stood where they were.

The Ho'Din dropped a hand onto Anakin's shoulder. Beneath a layer of calm, his Force sense sank into sadness. He spoke quietly. "We all lose friends sometimes."

A sense of betrayal was settling around Anakin like a hard shell. _Was this how much you cared about me, Master Qui-Gon? To go off with the Sith without a word goodbye? _

_ At least he didn't knock me out the last time he ever saw me._

He reined in his rueful smile when he saw Rali looking at him. Maybe Ho'Din didn't cry, but his eyes had the same fragile look as humans'. _What _was _the last thing Qui-Gon said to me?_

He couldn't remember.

Together, Anakin and Rali followed the Masters.

**Senator Palpatine interrupted **Mas Amedda mid-sentence. "Wait a moment, please. I seem to have an incoming call."

He put his aide on hold and say back into the plush chair of his office, alone.

Darth Maul was dead. The Force told Sidious that loud and clear. The dark side locus around his ship had died with him.

Sidious gave a tut-tut of disapproval. He hadn't meant for Maul's fate to go this way, but nor had Sidious' main objective changed. Anakin Skywalker was a nexus in the Force who made Darth Maul, the Jedi Council, and even Palpatine himself (if the boy's power was left unsupervised) pale in comparison. For that very reason, he would be constantly supervised, and for that reason, Sidious had no reason for to care about Darth Maul any more. Sidious' extensive research of Sith Lords had found no one with this much galaxy-changing potential since the exiled Knight of four thousand years ago who had remade the Jedi Order.

Anakin was in the Council's custody now, but that would change in time. At present, it was enough that Skywalker was no longer in the danger and obscurity of Tatooine.

Maul's death—and, more importantly, the Jedi's failure to reform him—might cause a schism among them that could be useful to Sidious.

Palpatine turned his chair toward the window to look out on the streams of traffic. Beyond them, the Jedi Temple towers were black against the sunset.

Just another day in the capital world of the Republic. Palpatine turned back to his work and switched his comm back on. "My apologies, Amedda. Please continue."

**As Anakin was **turning his sheets back to go to bed, his commlink buzzed. Sleepily, the boy padded across the small room to the dressing table, scooped the small device up, and checked who was calling.

The instant he read the name, he felt wide awake despite the darkness outside. _Qui-Gon._

Outside his room, Anakin could not hear Ki-Adi meditating or puttering about making tea. (Ki-Adi made his tea differently from Qui-Gon. Not only did he use Cerean spices, but he let it steep longer after shutting off the stove. Percolating, he called it. Widening the flavor.) Anakin picked up the comm. "Hello?"

It was Qui-Gon's husky voice. "Anakin."

The boy nearly gasped. His mouth moved to form the word M_aster _but his brain realized that that was not what he wanted to call the man, what he really meant. Qui-Gon had never looked down on him; never thought he was a slave. But Anakin switched the syllables of _father _around and simply said his mentor's name. "Where have you been?"

This little comm had no holosuite, so Anakin had to picture Qui-Gon looking down as his voice came slightly muffled. "I know there's no way to make this easy. I won't tell that it's the will of the Force, or that everything we love has to be broken down and left behind eventually."

"You're doing that thing where you talk in phrases Master Yoda would say." Anakin swiped the side of his hand against his eyes. Tears didn't last long on Tatooine, falling victims to evaporation or Watto; he wasn't sure what to do with them now, alone on the shining capital.

Qui-Gon sighs, but his eyes shine. "You will always be able to see through people, young one."

(Anakin will remember this phrase for a long time. Because of it, he will trust himself. He will build his powers toward what he thinks they should be for-seeing, reading, tearing through people. _Apology accepted, Captain Needa._)

They talked for a time. Afterward, Qui-Gon signed off.

**19 BBY**

Ciaràn woke up in the ruins of the Scimitar. Plants and moss did not take well to the sheer metal of starships; the hulk had remained on the hillside, but for some reason or another the town had never dragged it away. It remained like a prehistoric thing, a skeleton kept in the ground for children to gawk at and for adults to be reminded just how old their planet was, and how young their species.

Darkness had seeped out of it like runoff, but some sense of import still remained.

Ciaràn lifted his head off his forearms and blinked. In front of him, a panel had collapsed. In the distance he could see the murk-covered viewport on the bridge, and yellow daylight shining weakly through. He had tucked himself into a corner, like a hibernating animal.

Why?

The last thing he could remember was going to sleep in his own bed. For some reason he had travelled. No vision had accompanied the change.

He shook his head and sat up, working his way out from under the sheet of metal. He could now remember a vague sense of needing to be somewhere familiar, somewhere protected.

Why?

The lift was broken, but the shaft remained, and vines had climbed in through the hatch and up toward what they thought was a source of light.

The Force was sending a warning. Not a shout, not a whisper like he heard one thousand times in fights. This was more like winds blowing in the fall, bringing the scent of leaves crushed underfoot; it was a storm in the air. It was a changing of the seasons.

Outside, the sun hung high while Ciaràn stepped out onto the grass. He blinked into the sky, searching out silver starships cruising far in the distance.

(_- bodies burning—rifles raised in white-armored hands and people scrabbling on the floor-)_

_ Why don't they use the Force? Ciaràn thinks. Those are Jedi Masters; they could buckle the plating beneath their feet and raise it up to surround their—_

_ Who is their assailant?_

He blinked again, trying to brush the vision away. His knees threatened to buckle, but he stood and shook it off.

The pull was back, but instead of driving him to a safe nest in the _Scimitar_, it was pulling in another direction, outward and upward. Far away.

It was pulling toward Coruscant.


	17. Chapter 17

**A/N: **I thought this was gonna be the last chapter. Now…I'm not sure when that'll be.

Blame any cheesy dialogue on the fact that I was trying to get Anakin to sound like he does in Battle of the Heroes.

* * *

** XVII.**

It took Ciaràn four days to reach Coruscant. When he did, the Temple was still burning and its murderer was still there.

Ciaràn wondered where Anakin had slept for these days, whether he too had curled up in the crumbling remains of his trials by fire. He could feel the former Jedi progressing through the Temple, burning to ash other lives and his own. Each time he killed was a little light of struggle, and then the smoky aftertaste of Anakin living with it. Ciaràn didn't know the boy well enough to help him change what he had become.

As it was, it was hard for Ciaràn to resist becoming him.

He wanted to see the Jedi die. This was a delicious dream that Maul had savored, just watching from above as the Temple crumbled. In his mind, Sidious was standing beside him and letting him loose. This wasn't a tragedy. It was a beautiful plan, finally realized-

But Ciaràn wasn't going to fall into that. He flexed his hands, keeping them from curling into fists. Instead of dwelling, he moved forward to see who else he could save.

Ciaràn brought his shuttle down well outside the lines drawn around the Temple by the white-armored troopers he could see dotting the landscape. Fires on the corner of the Temple made orange light, conflicting with the city gray of the dawn. Anakin's darkness danced around him like flames. Ciaràn had not used stealth augmented by the Force since…since before the Jedi had taken him.

He jumped out onto the crumbly surface of a roof, and looked around. Below him, troopers were out in force in speeders and on the sidewalk. Some had animals accompanying them on long leads, thin, barbed tails whipping. Ciaràn leapt to a ledge on the Temple's second floor to hear what he could hear.

A trooper walked by below him, with a creature at heel. The man was clothed in thin plastic armor. (So these were the clones Ciaràn had seen on the news on Alderaan, and had discussed briefly with Bail. The public face and sword of the Republic.) The animal had a strong skull and sharp teeth, but folds of skin below its neck where a killer could grab and twist and get to the fragile tubes beneath-

Anakin's wrath peaked again.

Maul wanted to be here. He had never wanted anything else _except _this revenge.

Anakin killed again, and Ciaràn leaned forward, his pupils widening, as Maul thought of the end of the Jedi.

Anakin was taking his place!

He dropped down on the clone, wrapping his hand around the warm throat just under the helmet before he touched the ground. As soon as he did, he whipped the clone around his back with the Force and with momentum. The trooper slammed against the wall, bone or armor cracking.

The animal, its leash dropped slack from the trooper's hand, lunged forward and sunk its hundred needle teeth into Ciaràn's arm.

(Vornskyr, Maul thought, remembering hours spent at a terminal researching the thousand myriad ways the Force manifested itself in life forms.)

The pain kicked in and Ciaràn made his other hand into a claw and punched the vornskyr in the throat. It let go, snarled and recoiled, and Ciaràn slammed his wounded forearm across its face, closing one of its yellow eyes.

His sleeve was tattered and dark with blood. He gritted his teeth and thought of Qui-Gon.

(_Jedi don't kill.)_

The vornskyr circled him, its shoulders shifting as the long, black-furred legs moved. He picked up a rock with the Force and threw. The vornskyr yelped as it struck the side of its face, but it angrily stalked forward.

Behind him, Ciaràn heard the trooper stir. His Force presence felt determined and noble.

There didn't need to be more death here, but Ciaràn had to move quickly.

He held out a hand and tried a Force technique he had never used before.

It was not hard to identify with the vornskyr's needs. The mess of Force presences around it were maddeningly tantalizing; it hunted with its mind like a snake hunted with heat pits, and there were just so many strong minds—

Slowly, Ciaràn lowered his hands, settling a calm aura over the beast and narrowing its focus. _Protect your master. You are among friends now._

As its ears raised and it settled on its haunches, those tantalizing targets faded away into the back of Ciaràn's mind. (_But he's twitching and ready. The Jedi are dying and he is not killing them. He's missing out. He has been sleeping for such a long time, but suddenly he is so very _awake-)

But Ciaràn had a purpose that was more important than that. He was stronger than Darth Maul now.

(He's waiting, _wanting-!)_

Ciaràn knelt down beside the wounded clone and pulled his helmet off. The vornskyr sat down beside the trooper as if to guard him. Black hair, weathered skin, human. He had been unconscious, but movement or the sooty air woke him up. He glared and tried to slam his elbow under Ciaràn's arm.

Ciaràn caught it in both hands, discarding the helmet so that it rolled a few times on the tarmac. "I'm not going to kill you," he growled.

"Who are you?"

"I'm looking for Anakin Skywalker." Ciaràn pushed the trooper's arm away, but did not pressure him further.

"General Skywalker and Chancellor Palpatine ordered that no one get inside the Temple. I repeat—Who. Are. You?"

Ciaràn blinked. He had no clear plan on what to say next, but the name of _Palpatine _flared and splintered inside his head. The Chancellor was important, the Force was telling him so. But why?

Without conscious prompting he scanned for the dimly remembered presence from when the Chancellor had visited the Temple near the time when Anakin arrived. He was in the Senate complex right now, haughty like a dragon sitting on its hoard—

And Ciaràn had never _really _sensed Palpatine in the Temple. That was a planted memory.

The man he was tracking now was Darth Sidious.

Ciaràn looked back at the clone. "I'm working for the Chancellor."

And because of the Force, and because this was not entirely a lie, the trooper said, "General Skywalker is making a sweep of the library."

_It's not just a sweep if he's killing all the people I sensed. _Ciaràn was in discovery mode now, like among the miners on Dorvalla—Sidious had given him his focus. "There are Jedi still in there."

"Some fugitives holed up in the stacks."

Ciaràn stood up. "I'm going to find him."

"The building is falling apart."

Ciaràn glared at the purple bruise forming on the trooper's cheek where part of his helmet had collapsed. "I don't doubt I can handle it."

He left the dogs of the military behind and walked toward the fire.

Entering the Temple was like being submerged in fog. Sparks of presences and ghosts of presences haunted the floors. Ciaràn couldn't stop to visit the places where he had walked with Qui-Gon. Anakin was in the library, and he knew Ciaràn was coming.

Ciaràn's instincts told him to try to sneak up on Anakin, but the Force had told the human that he had a visitor already…and Maul _would _choose to sneak here, but rescues were louder than murders. Despite what Maul would have wanted, he did not waver from one path through the center of the Temple halls.

Some of the disks on the library shelves were still glowing. Anakin stood in a corner near the center of the library, red and gray with the burning. Rubble and mostly deactivated computer terminals formed an obstacle course around him. Other, frightened presences—Padawans, initiates maybe—hid in the walls.

Standing still, Anakin looked like a pillar of onyx. "You've picked some time to come back."

Ciaràn moved in slowly. "I came when the Force called."

He could barely tell this was the same boy he'd known before. His hair was darker, and curled. A pink scar bisected his eye. Anakin circled Ciaràn gradually, his lightsaber deactivated but gripped tightly in one gloved hand. Behind him, lumps of clothing on the ground were dead Jedi with cinder hearts.

Anakin said, "You're shorter than I remember."

Ciaràn skipped right to the one thing he thought might bring Anakin's mentality back to when he was pure Jedi. "Qui-Gon's teaching hasn't brought you to this."

"I'm not Qui-Gon's apprentice.. I've got a new master, and the Jedi need to die."

He didn't wait for proof that Ciaràn was one of them or not. He drew his lightsaber and charged.

Ciaràn triggered the orange lightsaber he'd had since he fled the Temple. Seconds later, the blades crossed.

Anakin shouted, "Then I'll create a world I can live in!"


	18. Chapter 18

** XVIII.**

The Padawans in hiding—the real fugitives—stirred as Anakin swung at Ciaràn in a diagonal slash so predictable Ciaràn could almost picture Drallig teaching it to him. The blades glanced against each other just as Ciaràn had practiced with Qui-Gon on Alderaan.

But it was not really with the two men, or the children, or their pasts, that this battle lay.

Anakin had been strong in the Force when Ciaràn knew him as a child, a sky-bright presence. Next to Yoda or Qui-Gon it was easy to forget how much of an outlier he was on the midi-chlorian scale, but then he would learn in one class a technique that usually took Padawans a week, or he would demonstrate some advanced technique that he had been using all along on Tatooine, just never knowing how to name it.

Now, Anakin had reached his potential. Some sadness that had been gnawing at him, feeding on the white innocent light of his spirit, had consumed him.

As Anakin's lightsaber pressed down, Ciaràn knew that the fight wasn't really between sentient beings holding swords. It was in the human's eyes, and in his little smirk, where Anakin was saying that he knew Ciaràn was weak in the Force compared to the Chosen One.

That was true, so Ciaràn decided to use the advantage he had.

He disengaged the lightsabers and kicked out at Anakin's knee. Anakin side-stepped, but Ciaràn had planned for that. He hooked his ankle behind Anakin's, and in the next moment Anakin was without his balance and reeling, but he twisted like a cat to fall on Ciaràn, lightsaber-first—

Ciaràn ducked his head, picked Anakin up around the middle, and threw both of them backwards. He closed his eyes and hit the ground. He used the Force, used the jolt, and shattered the crystal in Anakin's lightsaber.

The fall knocked the hilt out of Anakin's hand, and he got to his feet while pulling it back. The seemingly undamaged hilt lay in his palm for a moment, glinting silver, and then Anakin threw it away.

Ciaràn lay there for a moment. "Did Ki-Adi give that to you?"

More movement in the walls, as the trapped Padawans climbed downward out of the ducts. Ciaràn flowed to his feet.

When Anakin turned around, his face was sculpted by anger; furrows between his eyes like dragon scales, teeth bared and white. "You're just like the rest of them! There's no need for any of you anymore. You, Qui-Gon, Ki-Adi—"

Ciaràn was heartened by the fact that at least one person thought he was just like the rest of the Jedi.

Anakin lifted rubble that had once been columns from the ground and threw it at Ciaràn. They pelted his chest and arms, driving him backward under the rain, and then Anakin followed them down.

Ciaràn brought his 'saber up in a wide sweep intended to burn but not maim. Their forearms locked as Anakin charged in, getting out of ideal blade range and forcing Ciaràn to stumble backwards under his push. The Zabrak dug his heels into the crumbling floor as Anakin tried to pull him toward a ledge that had once been a study alcove. Its stairway had collapsed, leaving a drop of three meters or so to a mushroom cap-shaped computer and holoproj terminal. Smoke gathered in the low section, partially obscuring the still bravely glowing computer lights.

"Why can't you live in this world?" Ciaràn said, and threw Anakin over his hip again. The boy wasn't as comfortable with fighting at close range as Ciaràn was, so Anakin didn't bother to continue. Even as he fell Anakin threw out his hands, and Ciaràn felt the stomach punch of a Force push. A second later he was looking at Anakin from high up in the air. Anakin stood near the former site of the stairway, feet stirring broken disks that lay like autumn leaf litter on the charred carpet.

Ciaràn fell toward the ceiling as if gravity had been reversed. He felt his hands brush stone. He relaxed and braced his fingers and feet as he jolted against the torn plaster, stone, and ferrocrete of the ceiling, scrabbled for a tenuous upside-down grip on a decorative fissure, and threw a circle of ceiling at Anakin.

He'd found a weak point. Dust and chunks of ferrocrete exploded down onto the ground. Ciaràn found one thick joist and clambered over to the top of it, closing his eyes against the dust. He caught at the end of the joist with his left hand, shifting his grip on his lightsaber to his last three fingers. He was thinking, not consciously, but just falling into the memory, of his double lightsaber. The orange one, fitted to a human hand with longer fingers than his, tipped onto the weight of its ignition plate, and although he grabbed for it, Ciaràn couldn't support its weight and his own. The lightsaber hilt pinwheeled down to the floor, lost in the avalanche of rubble.

The chunk of ceiling hitting the ground made a deafening thud that engendered other muffled shifts throughout the building.

Darth Maul was bringing the Temple down.

He took a deep breath. In the corner of the library, the surviving initiates peered into the quiet.

Anakin's body had disappeared under the rubble, but his Force presence stirred. Ciaràn dropped down and moved the few steps necessary to retrieve his lightsaber.

Anakin pushed out of the rubble, shaking gray and red dust out of his hair. Ciaràn was startled, and Anakin took that moment to emerge fully.

He was not unscathed. His clothing was scuffed and frayed; one leg was bloodied and dragging. His right hand swinging at his side had been torn and impossibly unraveled. Ciaràn saw tubes pulling and servomotors blinking under the unnervingly realistic synthskin, and wondered where Anakin had lost his hand, or if he had chosen to replace it.

Anakin's rage in the Force boiled and overflowed into the world. Rocks behind him jumped as if in a groundquake. The remains of the stairway behind him crumbled onto the holoproj station. A bashed corner's exposed wires caught the remains of a rug and flared up, igniting the floor.

Any fire alarm that might have gone off had done so and finished long ago; Ciaràn could imagine the clones telling firefighters not to bother entering the Temple.

It was better that way. This fight was between two something-like-Jedi, over the corpse of their Order.

"Why can't you live as a Jedi?" Ciaràn shouted, trying to get to the core of Anakin's words. He glanced down at the lightsaber lying between them.

Anakin limped toward him, struggling through the pain he must be feeling. Ciaràn could see it in his posture. "You should know," Anakin said. "The Jedi were always weak. Did your master tell you that he's mine now? Did you know he was just _using _you to make an Empire?"

Anakin was going to pick up the lightsaber, and Ciaràn began to form a plan with a tenuous ending… "Darth Sidious is powerful," he said, trying to push away the hurt Anakin's words created. Sidious had _lied_…but then, he had never told Maul to tell the truth. "But he will not last. Evil can become good." He thought of the way he had run to the _Scimitar _for refuge.

"You're _hypocrites_. You, the Jedi, the Republic, Ki-Adi and his _wives-!"_

He rushed forward, scooped up the lightsaber. Ciaràn checked his movement immediately, clamping one hand around Anakin's neck and one onto his upper arm. He trapped Anakin's hand with his elbow before the human could trigger the lightsaber. Shoving back and forth as they struggled, Ciaràn bore Anakin backwards.

At the brink, the soles of Anakin's boots melted into tar as the green-edged fire neared them. Anakin strained, but Ciaràn set in his lower stance and held on with an immovable grip. The edge beneath Anakin started to crumble. Chunks of ferrocrete that fell into the fire popped and set off sparks of electricity from the crushed machinery.

"You won't kill me," Anakin said.

It was not a hard decision for Ciaràn to make, really. Qui-Gon and Yoda would not have wanted him to murder Anakin, but they were not here. They were not feeling the epicenter as Maul could. The sacking of the Temple was a culmination, a grand and terrible thing full of possibility; the towers waiting to fall like they had always waited, and Anakin dark, dark, dark with a jealousy and hate that Ciaràn could not name—

The Force had always told Ciaràn that the Order was going to fall.

He leaned closer to Anakin, the man who was not at this moment the Chosen One or the memory of a blonde-haired boy, but simply Darth Maul's enemy—"I never lied to you, Skywalker. I'm not that complex."

He shoved. Anakin fell backwards almost shockingly quickly, lightsaber still in his hand. Ciaràn stepped away from the edge.

Anakin, falling head over heels, smiled.

Ciaràn sensed his deception.

Anakin swept his bloodied, silvered hands and tore a section of wall apart, sending three initiates tumbling out. A Cathar, a Zabrak, a Nautolan. Anakin clutched at the wall as he fell, shredding his synthskin further. The metal claws thus revealed hooked into the wall and brought his bracing body to a halt.

Ciaràn glanced aside at the recovering children. Anakin had revealed them for a reason, hadn't he-!

Anakin pushed himself off the wall and upward, activated the orange lightsaber, flipped over Ciaràn, and stabbed. The saber caught Ciaràn on the side and felt like it had gone right through him. The instinct to move aside triggered a flash of pain.


	19. Chapter 19

**XIX.**

The pain was red in the center and had edges without color. It beat Ciaràn about the eyes for while before taking a solid scarlet form on his side just below his ribs. Something—multiple somethings—were poking into his back. Someone overhead was talking.

"It's Master Skywalker!"

"He's a Sith."

"This one tried to help us."

It was so very dark that the Force became his dominant sense. There was so much information in it that he needed to retreat, out into the city where there was—

Sidious was out there. He was on his way, riding a velvet-lined cab surrounded by clone bodyguards on speederbikes. He knew.

Somewhere inside Maul resonated the word _Master._

_ My apprentice, _Sidious wheedled in his soft-as-senators voice.

Ciaràn shook his created instincts off. "You won't take Anakin and I," he muttered, still looking at the flashing color behind his eyes.

_No, I will not take you back_, said Sidious in his mind._ But my world will come to be._

His defiance was not in words but in struggles and remembered rages and the sort of shaking sleepers do when they're trying to come out of a dream.

The voices continued—real voices, not Force-thoughts from afar. "He hurt Master Skywalker. They were fighting."

Another voice: "They're both Sith. Look at their eyes."

Ciaràn's eyes, even if they had been open before, started working for him now. Little fires in the room crackled. Anakin was a black-and-bronze figure picking his slow way over the rubble with his back to his fallen opponent. Ciaràn moved slowly to feel where he had been stabbed, smoothing down the cloth, flinching away from raw skin. He felt himself breathing slowly, in and out. Not dead. Just almost incoherent to himself with a pain that he pushed into a corner of his mind with Sidious.

The Temple had gone quiet. The only life he could sense was the brightness of the three children beside him.

The Nautolan leaned over him. "He's not dead!"

It echoed.

Anakin turned and locked his gaze on the Initiates. Ciaràn sat up, spurring on a burning patch of pain; he turned onto his side and breathed, waiting for it to die down. Anakin was going to bring the rest of the ceiling down; Ciaràn could feel it. The Chosen One was not going to bother to bloody his hands further. Ruining the room beyond rediscovery was the best way now of destroying the evidence.

Ciaràn raised his left hand. He threw, but even as Anakin fell across the room the Chosen One used the Force without gesture and for a moment they were both in the air. Then Anakin ploughed into the ground. Ciaràn fell and growled, confused with pain, with Palpatine's world and Anakin's fire-red world, with time beating like hearts _nownownow—_

The Initiates were throwing things at Anakin; rocks and datapads, and one boy picked up a spar of metal with the Force, too young to know it should be difficult because it was taller than he was, and maybe it was the first time he had ever used the Force for attack.

"No." Ciaràn tried to sit up again, reaching. "Not for attack." He caught a warm handful of cloth over somebody's shoulder and wondered, wide-eyed and looking down at the ground as if he could see Qui-Gon in it, whether he had been following his own rule.

Bur Anakin was carried away by an avalanche of objects. He fell over the edge, swept across the room, and the shorted computer table sent out knots of blue lightning. Flame caught on Anakin's cloak, ripping through and blackening.

"Get out of here." Ciaràn pushed the Initiates behind him. "If I can't follow, get over the roof of the hanger. My ship's nearby. An old shuttle."

_I'm sending them to their doom, _Ciaràn thought. They might not know enough to make it past the vornskyrs and the clone troopers, or even find the crossing across the street. But Sidious was coming, and Ciaràn had not yet decided whether he was going to kill Anakin. It would be as easy now as not saving him.

The warm presences at his back retreated.

Anakin caught a spark and jolted. His hair stuck up over his ash-marked forehead; blue bolts jumped between his teeth, and his struggling stopped. He still managed to hold on to a broken joist sticking out of the wall of mortar. The steps down to the computer had mostly disintegrated, leaving only the sagging skeleton of a railing.

Ciaràn tried to get up again. He could tell well enough now that Anakin had missed any essential organs when he had stabbed him; he had instead carved a furrow into the bands of muscle under Ciaràn's arm, leaving a cauterized but open wound. He couldn't bend to get up. Anakin would be left on his own after all.

_That's good enough_, Ciaràn thought. _Let fate take him._

_ That is good enough indeed_, Palpatine said. _You could have done better, but you've done enough, my apprentice._

But there was behind their old, old bond some thin snickering laughter. Darth Maul had never been needed here. Sidious thought, flushed with success and time, that he controlled the Force.

Anakin shouted, his voice cracking. He dug at the dirt with his elbows, trying to climb back up as the fire took him. "You haven't beaten me! The Jedi are finished."

He slipped over the edge. Orange flames flared. Ciaràn lay back against the floor and mourned him. Temple joists settled into new positions on their splintered edges. Sidious was coming, with a shaded car and a clone escort and a cryo chamber.

* * *

Somewhere in the galaxy, Padme Amidala was dying and Bail Organa was holding her hand.

He had called the Jedi on his world when he learned of the sudden movements of clone troopers toward Temples, but got no answer.

* * *

Ciaràn woke up. He was warm and comfortable and thought that he might be back in his bed in Danoda. Then he smelled the smoke and opened his eyes, and was surprised to see that he was still at the Temple, on a wide ledge outside it. Around him, clones tended their own wounded and a few human security officers. Ciaràn's side felt cool and painless. He looked down to see that the furrow had been packed and bandaged. The air was pleasant against his skin, and he looked around for his cloak before gaining enough sense of time and place that he realized he had a bigger problem. These were Sidious's troopers.

Carefully, he turned over and got his feet to the ground. Expecting pain, he felt none.

A stiff-backed clone hurried over to the gurney as soon as he saw the movement. For a split second Ciaràn looked at him with confusion, not sure whether he was about to be attacked or arrested.

"You're all right, sir," the clone said calmly. "All stitched up."

Ciaràn sorted one question out of the many, one that hopefully made him sound like he knew what he was doing. "Where's Anakin Skywalker?"

"Emperor Palpatine recovered the general personally. Said we weren't to go nearby, just this special medical team. My squad came in first when we saw part of the wall collapse." He had a pronounced accent, with wide vowels. "I recognized you."

Ciaràn blinked. Did Sidious have a warrant out for him? What did clones do with captured Sith? He made himself remain calm. "I cannot say likewise."

The clone took his helmet off, and Ciaràn saw the dark, yellowing bruise under his eye socket. "CT-919. I didn't know you were an Inquisitor before, sir. They're a new branch. But we've done as you've wanted. All the Jedi are taken care of or missing in action. We'll get them."

Ciaràn passed a hand over his face, feeling his arm delay as the anesthetized wound moved. "Some, young ones, escaped."

"I haven't gotten reports that anyone's seen them, sir, but the dogs'll get 'em. We're patrolling everywhere."

Ciaràn took a moment to process who he was supposed to be before answering. He was relieved to know that the Initiates were still alive and terrified that he might make the search for them more thorough—but there was so much searching going on he wasn't sure it could get worse. He said, "Good work."

He stood up, carefully, feeling the twinges. He felt fear and anger work its way into his body, tightening down the muscles of his face. What had been meant as an inquiry into how to take care of his wound came out as "What did you do to me?"

The trooper moved one step away. These Inquisitors much have worked—must have been ruthless—to have a reputation already. (That, or this clone was just remembering his first encounter with the Zabrak.) If Ciaràn was going to be alive much longer he was going to have to fight these Inquisitors. Where had Sidious gotten them?

_(Same place he got me. Same place he got Anakin.)_

The clone said, "Bacta packs and synthskin. You ought to get in a tank."

"I don't have time for that, trooper." (Was that the correct form of address? How did you tell their ranks?) "I need to search for those Jedi. My ship is nearby."

"We should send a squad to escort you."

"No!" Ciaràn snapped. He leaned forward and the clone leaned back, but then replaced his helmet so that Ciaràn couldn't see his confused expression. "I work alone."

And he pushed off the gurney and stalked down the ledge, using his anger to look like one of Sidious's Force monsters or whatever it was he had created, wondering whether Anakin was alive. Sidious had sent a special medical team for him. Curious. He headed for the catwalk he had come by, looking around for the Initiates and sweeping in the chaotic Force landscape. Glancing back, he saw CT-919 point a group of four troopers in his direction.


	20. Chapter 20

_A/N: It's been a while. I'd like to thank everyone who's stuck with this story for so long. _

_After chapter 21, _Fearful Symmetry _will be over. This will mark the first time in years that I do not have a Star Wars story in progress. That is a Big Deal.

* * *

_

**XX.**

Ciaràn had underestimated the return journey. Jumps that had been two stories down on the way here were now two stories _up_. A catwalk he had used was inaccessible unless he scaled a wall first. His comm was not equipped to call the old Jedi transport ship to his location, and besides, the clones would be suspicious of it right away if he tried to take the Initiates away in their sight.

The four troopers that had been tentatively assigned to him had apparently not been assigned very strictly. They stopped four meters away and stood there talking, one with his helmet under his arm to show a swarthy face. (Getting some fresh air after killing any Jedi he could find.)

"Dismissed," he said to them casually as he walked by. It was fear that kept the tone soft and breathy, but it sounded like arrogance to them; he could tell by their Force presences. Unlike their faces, those were easy to tell apart.

As soon as he was out of their line of sight, he took off running. The lightsaber wound that the clone medics had wrapped for him twinged but remained tight and could be ignored.

One jump carried him to the side of a wall, where gloved fingers ripped at ancient stone. Another jump brought him to the opposite wall. Another led to a sloped roof on the lower edge of the Temple. For a frightening instant he scrambled to stop from slipping backwards down toward the distant public streets, but then with a heave of the Force he pushed off again. The Initiates—he automatically looked for the vengeful murk of the Scimitar, but it wasn't the ship that would come to his rescue here—were a bright cluster in the distance, and coming closer.

Ciaràn landed on a roof that Padawans had probably dared each other to reach, back when the Temple was living. He stood up and looked around. Traffic of every color streamed by below him, and a clone trooper with a black sniper rifle in his white-plated hands turned around, clicking the gun down to short range.

Engine noises grew louder as someone broke out of the streams of traffic and powered toward the rooftop. Ciaràn could sense its occupants, and for a moment fear rooted him to the ground.

And then the Force slowed time down. The clone trooper squeezed the trigger. Ciaràn took two steps forward and jumped over the clone, activating his lightsaber in mid-air. He landed with the hilt tucked under his arm so that he could stab the trooper just by taking a step backwards.

Ciaràn had had enough of death, now—that was Anakin's path—but it would be so much _easier-_

He turned and grabbed the clone's wrist. The armor held firm against his grip and did not break; Ciaràn grimaced, showing teeth.

The clone leaned back and punched him in the face.

Red-black pain ate up his cheekbone and right eye. The engine noise grew louder just blended into it. He feared for them, for the Jedi children that he knew were coming to his rescue, but it was not the kind of fear that he had once used to fuel his strength.

The clone fired the rifle. Ciaràn raised his lightsaber half an inch and bounced the bolt back. It drilled into and blackened the clone's right shoulder, and he hunched and fumbled the gun. Ciaràn reached forward and wrenched the clone's helmet off, not caring if it hit the man in the chin and strained his neck on the way.

The cool air made the clone blink. Ciaràn said, "Leave now and you live."

The clone said, "They told us you would say that," and shot him.

All the bruises and scratches from his fight with Anakin flared with pain again as the shot tore out the ministrations the other clones had done and fit neatly into the lightsaber wound. Ciaràn dropped, his knees smacking against the roof and the breath gasping out of him; his thoughts narrowed to a place he had neared but never been before: _Get me out of here. Make it stop. Let me go home._

The fought and bludgeoned at the pain with the Force until he could look up and see the clone standing over him, firing at the ship; it had landed near the edge of the roof, and a square of yellow light from its open hatch fell across the asphalt. Figures edged into the doorway, and the Force crowed.

Laserfire screaming overhead, Ciaràn smiled.

His side burned under his ribs and he fell forward, unable to resist the pain-weight for long. Three small forms were silhouetted in the yellow light, their hands outstretched. With identical movements, they picked the clone up with the Force.

Ciaràn thought, _Don't kill him._

Three bright presences felt their Temple burning.

_Don't kill him._

Three bright presences were struck with the memory of Anakin, with the orange of his eyes.

Ciaràn curled his hand on the ground, scraping at asphalt pebbles, and dropped the struggling clone onto the sloped roof that Ciaràn had traversed minutes earlier.

As soon as the clone was occupied with trying to climb back up the slope, the Initiates lost their supernatural coordination. They rushed out of the ship and waved frantically for Ciaràn to join them inside.

He could feel the hole in his side like it was ready to collapse, but he pushed to his feet with the thought of fire falling all around Anakin. Nautolan hands and Cather paws pulled at his arms to help him up. The Initiates supported him as he moved into the ship and toward the pilot's seat.

"What do they teach you these days?" He managed. "You flew this here?"

"There was clones everywhere." The Cathar, a little brown-furred boy, hopped into the small navigator's jumpseat behind the pilot's.

"Yes," said the Nautolan matter-of-factly. "We did."

_This_, Ciaràn thought, _is war, and these are Jedi._

"Where are we going?" The small Zabrak, a skinny girl without any tattoos on her tan face, peeked into the bridge.

Ciaràn did not know, and then he thought of Bail and the one place that had always been safe. "Alderaan." He put in the coordinates.

When the ship was safely flown out of Coruscant's gravitational influence, he sent it into hyperspace. The small lurch of the drive kicking in reminded him of the pain in his side, sharpening its dulled stabs. He said, "I have to," and stood up.

In the pain of movement he couldn't speak any more. The Cathar got a death grip on his wrist but was too short to provide much stability. With all the lurching slowness of a being three times his age, Ciaràn made his way to the bunk near the center of the ship. The Initiates looked in at him curiously as he lay on top of the bedclothes. He looked at them for a moment before his eyes lidded of their own accord. The Initiates had gotten themselves here; they would do all right during the ride. They would…

Darkness overtook him.

And after a time, a sleep in which he felt like there was something always nagging at him in its far corners, the darkness retreated. A shape stood in front of him, misted in blue against the black of the dark room. He had turned the lights off, hadn't he? Maybe the Initiates…had turned on a blue light. Yes.

There was no blue light.

A soft male voice said, "Ciaràn? That's what they call you."

Ciaràn opened his eyes. Something in his wound had clotted; he could not sit up. The voice reminded him of a sun-bright fight, of the urge to _kill_ this man and his Jedi Master-but he shook off those drives and tried to remember who this really was, from another point of view…

He said, "Obi-Wan."

"That's right." The Padawan looked the same age as he had back on Tatooine, and wore the same brown-and-cream robes. "I have a task for you."

"Wha…"

"You must go to the Bellassa system. There you will find Ferus Olin, a former Jedi Knight who survived the Purge. Take the Initiates to him. But first, return to Alderaan. Bail will provide both safety and danger for you, and the future of the Order."

"You're dead."

Obi-Wan smiled. "That only stops us when the Force wills it to."

"I…"

"You don't think about forgiving a storm if it ruins your travels sometimes." He faded out into a gray light that blended with the room around him. Ciaràn remembered that he had been sleeping, and as quickly as he recalled the sensation, it returned.


	21. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

High-pitched voices were nagging at him. Ciaràn blinked and rolled over, bracing on his forearms. They stung but could hold his weight, and his side felt cool and painless, as if it had been Force-healed during the night. Maybe it had, if his mind had naturally used that power…or maybe Obi-Wan had healed him.

Ciaràn mouthed the name, remembering the Jedi's instructions as clearly as if they were written in a datapad he could consult at hand.

The Initiates were standing next to his bed. The Cathar spoke again. "Master! We're here! We need you to land the ship."

"Right, right." Ciaràn rubbed his eyes and blearily shuffled out of the room. In the hall he shook all over to dispel the feeling of sleep clouding his thoughts. The viewports showed the black of space, and Alderaan hanging within it. Was there more space traffic than usual? He couldn't be sure. There were none of the triangular Republic battle ships that might show that the coup had extended here too.

He took the ship down to the palace. Security forces tried to have him disembark farther away from the palace than the Organa's private landing pads, but soon after, as Ciaràn started to worry that the Initiates would need to hide somewhere in the ship if they landed in a public spaceport, Bail himself came over the comm and ordered that they proceed.

The four Jedi disembarked into the eager, nervous presences of the senator and his wife. Lady Organa set to occupying the children. She held a baby in her arms, a humanoid child wrapped completely in white swaddling.

"We have many guests today," she said to the children as she walked away with them.

Healing, though, was priority for Ciaràn. Bail's private physician examined and stitched his wound while the Zabrak was mercifully unconscious. He woke up feeling fragile again, the stitches digging into his side.

The room was cool and calm, though, with white stone walls and a window that appeared to look out onto the mountains and modern cities of Alderaan. It was a hologram, really; he could tell from the way that it flickered.

Bail entered dressed in a long, navy blue robe and carrying a child; maybe the same one his wife had held, but Ciaràn couldn't be sure. The Force presence was only as different as it might be between one of the baby's capricious emotional states and another.

Ciaràn just looked at Bail. He did not have the skill for small talk and did not know where to start with business. Palpatine's betrayal? The elimination of the Jedi? The emerging Empire? Obi-Wan's warning, or Anakin's fall?

Bail said, "You knew this would happen."

Ciaràn thought of Sidious. "Yes. Darth Maul knew. I forgot a lot of him, here. And I never knew when Sidious would choose to move."

"Yoda knew some of it. He gave me instructions to give to you," said Bail.

"Obi-Wan gave me instructions as well. He said you could help."

"Qui-Gon's Padawan spoke to you? I thought he was dead."  
"He is. The Force gave me a vision, and he said I should find someone called Ferus Olin, and give the young ones I came here with into his care."

"Ah ha; Ferus has worked for Alderaan a few times. He is in hiding in the Outer Rim; I should be able to find his location. It is becoming very difficult to get on or off any planet, however, without the Empire's say. Being a senator still means something, so I will help you as I can."

"Thank you," said Ciaràn.

"The galaxy is changing." Bail looked grave. "I only hope that we can change it again. Yoda asked me to add to your list of passengers." He looked down at the baby in his arms. "This is Luke Skywalker. Anakin's son."

Ciaràn gaped. "Anakin's…" (_I am still not sure whether I let his father die._)

"Yoda says he is strong in the Force," Bail said.

"I sensed it when I saw him with Breha."

Bail laughed softly. "That was Leia, Luke's twin sister. Yoda told us that they had a twin bond that Jedi could sense. I didn't know it could confuse them."

"Apparently it does," Ciaràn said.

"Both children need to be hidden from the Empire. Yoda agrees that one should stay here with us. Breha has always wanted a daughter. Luke, though, needs to be delivered to Tatooine."

Sun-bright memory. "Why Tatooine?"

"Yoda says that he thinks Anakin will hesitate to go there, after the history he has with it. Also, it is far out of reach; the Empire may not care to enforce its Jedi hunt there, and they will have the Hutts to contend with if they want to set down a military presence."

Ciaràn nodded.

"Yoda wants you to visit him on Dagobah before going on to Tatooine."

Ciaràn had missions now, and this was good. Ferus Olin. Dagobah. Tatooine.

"I will do this for you."

Bail said, "Thank you. I will help you all I can, if a senator's word ever had any influence on the Outer Rim."

The three Initiates left Ciaràn as quietly as they arrived. Ferus Olin had a small group of Jedi on his world of Bellossus, en route to a hopefully untraceable space station, floating in the darkness. He was surprised by Ciaràn's appearance and said that it might be useful, in this day and age, to look like a Sith. Ciaràn replied, with much knowledge of experience, that under Palpatine's rule there were only two Sith to fear. The Dark Jedi, though, the betrayers—these, he could blend into if need be, as long as Sidious saw no suggestion of his face.

Ciaràn had no idea whether his old Master knew he was still alive. More likely he didn't care. Darth Maul had always been a placeholder for the little boy he had met on Tatooine, and Ciaràn was, to Sidious, just another Jedi without a temple.

His new Master lived on a gray-green world where Ciaràn spent far too much time looking for enough dry land uncluttered by trees and vines to set the ship down. He was ready to hand the baby over when Yoda met him at the ramp and poked at Luke's cowl to peer at his blue eyes.

Ciaràn shifted nervously, digging his boot heel back and forth into the soggy, black dirt. Yoda had stolen his identity, not so long ago. (It felt like long ago.) Now, the Master of a dead Order was standing in the mud leaning on a broken branch, looking up at him with lantern eyes.

Yoda said, "Good it is that you have come. Instructions I have."

"They could have been passed to Bail." Ciaràn could not bring himself to enjoy Yoda's presence, although his Jedi self knew that his change had been for the better. It had still been an affront.

"Indeed, they could have been, hmm. Called you here only for instructions, I did not." Yoda did not apologize. He gently moved back the baby's cowl so that Luke could see around. He blinked, and turned his head back and forth among the swaddling. "Remember this place, Luke must. Find it again he will…like somewhere from a dream.

"Until then, though, take him to Tatooine you must. Hide there you can."

"Do you want him back in Mos Espa?" _With Qui-Gon's pyre?_

Yoda shook his head. "His aunt and uncle in Mos Eisley live. Find the Lars family, you will, and leave the boy with them. Trust you they will not."

The brusqueness of his statement meant that Ciaràn did not know how to react.

"There, hide from the Empire you can. Watch the boy. The Force he will show within him…and maybe some of his father. Saw Anakin at the last, did you not?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"Only Bail. Watch Luke. See that he does not become Anakin…and does not remember."

"Until the time is right, you mean. Do you plan on recreating the Order?"

"Hmm." Yoda looked down and back, suddenly very old and tired, and did not answer. Ciaràn wondered what it was like for him, this ancient being who had known the Order for hundreds of years instead of a handful of months, to lose it, and whether or not that contributed to the fact that he showed nothing. He still played the old mentor.

"I will do as you ask," Ciaràn said, and re-entered his ship, carrying Luke, without having once called Yoda 'master'.

Tatooine. It took Ciaràn some time to find the spot, and then he saw the bantha ties, little rusted spears stuck into the sand. They were one of the few permanent marks of where Tusken Raiders occasionally camped outside a city to trade, and Ciaràn remembered them from Darth Maul's fight with four Jedi.

The rest of the sand had shifted, creating sinks and dunes against the city wall that erased any trace of the packed-sand landscape that had been there months ago. He felt like he should do something symbolic for the death of Obi-Wan and the birth of Ciaràn, but the sand had taken it all away.

Owen and Beru Lars had taken the young Luke Skywalker with sighs and sand-colored smiles. Ciaràn had scanned the desert in his ship and found a home he thought he might like to live in; a little place out on the edge of what they called the Dune Sea, where the Raiders lived. It had once been, the doughy human bartender had told him, an entrepreneurial water farm. Sand People had ended that plan, but Ciaràn thought that he would deal with the desert's native people just fine. Then, Ciaràn had sat down on the sand and looked over the Lars homestead.

His ship was sitting in the sand a few dunes away, now. Maybe he would let it sit and the Sand People take it away in parts; more likely he would sell it. He needed credits, now when the word of the Jedi counted for nothing. (The mind tricks of a Jedi did count for something, and he thought that maybe puzzling over that, entirely Jedi moral dilemma might take up some of his time.)

The suns burnt down, making him wish for clothing that was lighter and less black than his uniform and cloak. He would learn how to survive—maybe even thrive—here.

Luke Skywalker was a small Force-spark, and his sister Leia had been one almost identical. Ciaràn thought of Anakin's eyes, as bright and far murkier than his own had ever been. His experience with Skywalkers was not over. It was right that he was back on Tatooine now, under the same suns and a different name, and it would, one day, be right for Anakin to come back here.

Until then, Ciaràn had housing to set up. He needed food and basic protection should the Empire come snooping. He needed room to practice teras kasi. He needed to keep an eye on Luke, and to think: about Yoda, about Obi-Wan, and Qui-Gon, and none at all about Sidious.

Ciaràn stood up, brushed the sand off his knees, and turned his back on the homestead for the first time.

_Fin. _


End file.
